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LIGHTED WINDOWS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE LOOKING GLASS . $i.oo net 

CHRISTMAS AND THE 
YEAR ROUND . . . i.oo net 

JUST HUMAN .... I.oo net 

FOOTNOTES TO LIFE . i.oo net 

ADVENTURES IN COM- 
MON SENSE .... I.oo net 

WAR AND WORLD 
GOVERNMENT. . . i.oo net 

John Lane Company, New York 



LIGHTED WINDOWS 



By Dr. FRANK CRANE 

Author OF "Christmas and the 
Year Round," "The Looking Glass," 
"Just Human," "Adventuees in 
Common Sense," Etc. 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
MCMXVIII 






Copyright, 191 8 
By JOHN LANE COMPANY 



MAY II 1918 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York. U. S. A. 



'GLA494984 



TO 

THE DIWY 

WHOSE LIGHT HAS ALWAYS 
BEEN IN THE WINDOW 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Lighted Windows 13 

A Morning Creed 16 

Loveliness 18 

Age and Shrinkage 21 

Unifying Forces 24 

The Harrowers 27 

The Cure of Distances 30 

The Laughers 33 

Od 36 

What the Stars Say 39 

Do THY Next Thing 41 

October 44 

On Time 47 

A Rainy Day 50 

Books and What's on Them 53 

Why I Love You 56 

The Sparrow 58 

DUCKBACKERS 6l 

What We Do Not Know 64 

Why Pain 67 

A Christmas Card 70 

The To-Morrow Mind 73 

The Fear of Failure 76 

The Building of the Sphere 79 

The Secret of Contentment 82 

Nature 85 

Allowance 88 

Coming Down and Giving Up 91 

Sunshine 94 

7 



PAGE 

Easter and the Dead Ones 97 

Is God Good? 100 

"Invictus" 103 

Shadows 106 

Why Is Marriage a Bore? 109 

The Money Myth 112 

Pegs and Holes 115 

The Divine Right oe Property n8 

Get Off the Kitten's Tail 121 

On the Death of a Good Woman 123, 

Professionalism 126 

Facts and Alcohol 130 

Day and Night 133 

Ben Franklin on Sunshine . 135 

Laborer and Artist 138 

The Success Fetich 141 

The Thinker as Wealth Maker 144 

Some Facts About Sex 147 

The Inefficient 150 

Condensed Presence .153 

Knocking on Wood .156 

Quiet and Darkness 159 

Faces 162 

Some Day 165 

Half Faith and Violence 168 

The Inevitable . 170 

The Bellicose Ego 173 

Something for Nothing 176 

News of the Week 179 

Unconscious Goodness . .. 182 

Legend 185 

The Silences 188 

The Eternal Compromise 191 

The Green City of Laughter 194 

The Chemistry of Thought 197 

My Ancestry 200 

Spelling 202 

The Peanut 205 

8 



PAGE 

Cupboards 208 

She 211 

Horoscope 214 

The Neighbor 217 

Going Some 220 

The Knowing Person 223 

Mr. AA 226 

The Easter Symbol 228 

The Land of Beginning Again 232 

The Inner Parliament 235 

The Teacher 238 

Forgetting Youth 241 

Be Polite 244 

Stop! Look! Listen! 247 

God's Modesty 250 

Early Spring 252 

The Mind a Refuge .......... 255 



LIGHTED WINDOWS 



LIGHTED WINDOWS 

One summer I lived a while in a little hotel 
that stood in a village and faced the mountain. 
Out of my window I could see a great glacier, 
and from it came a roaring waterfall, the white 
blood of the ice monster, running away forever. 

The huge mountain-mass loomed up sombre, 
imposing. All day long it stood sturdy in the 
sun, and showed its brown shoulders, its rock 
teeth, its green pine whiskers, as if a sleeping 
giant, a dead demiurge. In the morning the 
dawn fairies bathed it in rosy mist; at noon the 
sun blazed over it and it glistened like the shields 
of warriors ; at twilight it towered, dark, thought- 
ful, melancholy, the dwelling place of mystery 
and of the hosts of fear. 

To watch it after sunset, when it slowly re- 
treated from vision and wrapped itself in clothes 
of shadow, was my melancholy pleasure. How 
many thoughts I sent out to it ! How many mem- 
ories it awoke in me ! 

And every evening when the dark was conquer- 
ing and the gloom full fallen, I saw a little light 

13 



far up the mountainside. It was a window, il- 
luminated by a lamp. I never knew who lived 
there, and never inquired. I had no wish to 
know. 

For whoever lit that window was one of the 
priests of life, representing to me the unknown 
ministries. He was unaware of me, yet for me 
his lamp shone. Behind the light was a soul, and 
he sent a message to my soul. 

All my life I have seen lighted windows in the 
twilight. Discouraged, I have walked the city 
streets and some woman has smiled at me. Pos- 
sibly she was a woman with an evil heart; but 
the charity of my sadness disinfected her signal, 
and it fell pure as a star upon my spirit. 

I have taken up a book at random, when vexed 
and cowardly, and have found a page therein 
that beamed; and I was heartened. 

I have opened my mail, while the clouds of a 
chill soul-weather were thick upon me, and have 
found a letter from some one I never knew; and 
there was a helpful, human word in it, and its 
warmth penetrated me and changed my day. 

I have glimpsed a happy child, a pretty girl, 
a wholesome woman, a hearty man, an adven- 
turous boy, a cheerful graybeard, and they have 
been to me as lighted windows, motioning broth- 
erhood signs to me. 

I have heard the whistling of a boy, the laugh- 
ter of a maid, the song of a gay worker, scraps 

14 



tered into me as rays of light 
mong crepuscular hills, 
at one sentence I have ever writ- 
upon one reader's soul as a 
len my words are not all waste; 
e and I, forever after, brothers 
)wn companions, travelling side 
laps a third with us, while *'our 
I us," as did the hearts of them 
; the evening road to Emmaus? 
mown mates whose lighted win- 
I feel you now. Shall not one 
sures of that next life be for us 
tering Pleiades, and soul with 
flames of happy light? 



15 



far up the mountainside. It 
luminated by a lamp. I nev( 
there, and never inquired. J 
know. 

For whoever lit that windc 
priests of life, representing t( 
ministries. He was unaware 
his lamp shone. Behind the lii 
he sent a message to my soul. 

All my life I have seen ligh 
twilight. Discouraged, I hav 
streets and some woman has s; 
sibly she was a woman with 
the charity of my sadness disi 
and it fell pure as a star upoi 

I have taken up a book at n 
and cowardly, and have four 
that beamed; and I was heartei 

I have opened my mail, wh 
chill soul-weather were thick i 
found a letter from some one 
there was a helpful, human t 
warmth penetrated me and ch* 

I have glimpsed a happy c 
a wholesome woman, a heart 
turous boy, a cheerful graybes 
been to me as lighted window? 
erhood signs to me. 

I have heard the whistling o 
ter of a maid, the song of a j 

14 



of sound that entered into me as rays of light 
from a window among crepuscular hills. 

And if so be that one sentence I have ever writ- 
ten shall strike upon one reader's soul as a 
lighted window, then my words are not all waste ; 
for are we not, he and I, forever after, brothers 
of mystery, unknown companions, travelling side 
by side, with perhaps a third with us, while "our 
hearts burn within us," as did the hearts of them 
that walked along the evening road to Emmaus? 

My myriad unknown mates whose lighted win- 
dows I have seen, I feel you now. Shall not one 
of the rarest pleasures of that next life be for us 
to meet, like clustering Pleiades, and soul with 
soul to mingle as flames of happy light? 



15 



A MORNING CREED 

When you awake in the morning you wash 
your body; why don't you wash your mind? 

You breakfast, putting food in your body to 
give you strength for the day : why don't you give 
your soul its breakfast? 

Therefore, learn this creed, better it if you can, 
and say it as your day begins. 

1. I want this day to be a cheerful and suc- 
cessful one, so that I may come to my resting bed 
to-night glad and satisfied. To accomplish this 
I will plan my day intelligently. 

2. As I know that happiness depends on me, 
my will and attitude of mind, and not on events, 
I will ADJUST myself to whatever happens. 

3. I will not WORRY. If a thing can be helped 
I will help it; if not, I will make the best of it. 

4. I will keep all mental poisons out of my 
thought. I will especially resist and exclude 
FEAR, which weakens and unnerves me. 

5. I will not allow myself to become ANGRY. 

6. I will resist pride. 

7. I will try to AFFECT PLEASANTLY every 
one with whom I am thrown in contact. I will 
try to make happiness as well as to receive it. 

16 



8. I will BELIEVE IN MYSELF. I will allow 

nothing to make me doubt myself nor to create 
in me discouragement or despair. 

9. I will not let myself despise any human 
being; and I will keep all contemptuous and con- 
demnatory thoughts of anybody out of my mind; 
neither will I speak derogatory words. 

10. I will keep my whole self in tune with 
positive, healthful and optimistic forces. 

11. I will make my ENFORCED intimacies as 
pleasant as possible ; I will get along without fric- 
tion or bickering, or strained relations, with my 
family, my neighbors, and my business associates. 

12. I will plan for at least a half hour's 
QUIET, for reflection and for cultivating my own 
spirit. 

13. I will be more honest, square, and prompt 
than business requires; more kind than charity- 
requires; more loyal than friendship requires; 
more thoughtful than love requires. 

14. I will do somebody a good turn that is 
not expected of me. 

15. If any person does me wrong I will not 
bear him a grudge ; I will try to FORGET it. 

16. I will ENJOY as heartily as I can what 
the day brings me; and get all the pleasure pos- 
sible out of eating, drinking, working, resting, 
amusements, and the people I meet; so that at 
night I may be able to say: ''I have lived to-day, 
and have found life good." 

17 



LOVELINESS 

**We dwell," wrote Fiona Macleod, "on this 
loveliness, or on that; and some white one, flame- 
winged, passes us on the way, saying, *it is love- 
liness I seek, not lovely things/ " 

And in that sentence you have a great and sug- 
gestive cleavage. 

The search for lovely things has no end. It is 
an incurable thirst. It is a quenchless fever. 

King Solomon sought lovely things, and piled 
up treasures of gems, and set up ivory palaces 
and golden temples, and got the smiles of many 
women and the gifts of kings; and at last wrote 
it down that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. 

The heart of the little child is wiser than this 

wisest man, for it loves the sunshine and the play 

of muscles and the wonder of flying birds, and 

gives itself to the beautiful world and does not 

, try to take from the world things to own. 

All down the street of time rich men have used 
their wealth to collect beautiful things; they have 
built them houses and bought pictures, statues 
and strange metals, cloths and jewels and curios; 

i8 



yet their souls have remained dry, and at death 
their hands held only the ashes of spent fancies. 

Their rifled tombs and gutted mausoleums are 
along the Appian Way, crowds gape at them in 
museums where they repose, having been stolen 
from Egypt; in modern graveyards they lie for- 
gotten with huge stones upon their breasts. 

Meanwhile the spirits of Dante, of Horace, 
and of Keats walk among the living and minister 
to minds alive, because they sought loveliness and 
were not deceived by the lust for things. 

The divine thirst for loveliness takes the spirit- 
ual gifts of the flower, the love of things plucks 
the flower. 

The love of loveliness ennobles woman, the 
greed for lovely things degrades her. 

You can never know the utter beauty and the 
transfiguring power of loveliness until you get rid 
of your clutter and take the open road. For 
beauty dwells only among souls that have stripped 
themselves naked of pride and holdings, and are 
as the unclothed gods who own the world yet own 
nothing In it. 

"One thing thou lackest. If thou wilt be per- 
fect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the 
poor, and come, follow me." 

Who can bear so hard a saying? There are 
many independently rich. Who can be independ- 
ently poor? 

There are millions of poor by necessity. Their 

19 



whine goes up day and night continually. But 
who can seek poverty as an opportunity? 

There are some, poor as Christ, poor as 
Buddha, poor as Socrates, poor as Thoreau. 

These are the oracles. To these men turn in 
the crises of life, asking, when the darkness of 
the infinite affrights, "Watchman, what of the 
night?" 



20 



AGE AND SHRINKAGE 

When I was a small boy I used to play around 
my grandfather's house in Paris, Illinois. Every- 
thing was big. I could not see over Gilbert's 
fence. It was a long way down the hill to the 
creek, and a journey of considerable adventure 
to go over to Uncle George's. The woods- 
pasture back of the barn, where the Eads boys 
and I played Indian and robber, was something 
like the great North American continent in ex- 
tent. The front porch of grandfather's house 
was a vast promenade, as the boardwalk at At- 
lantic City, and the upper portico a fine and im- 
posing rampart. My relatives, such as cousins 
and aunts, were of legendary stature, and in my 
imagination mingled on terms of equality with 
the Caliph of Bagdad, Ivanhoe, David and Go- 
liath, and Cinderella. The trees were miles high, 
and the dogs as big as lions. 

I went away. I grew up. I became twenty- 
one years of age and very wise. I returned to 
Paris, Illinois. And, behold ! the whole stage set- 
ting of my youth had been reduced to miniature. 
It was as though I were looking at it with the 

21 



larger lenses of the opera glasses to my eyes. 

When I walked by Gilbert's fence I could look 
right over it. Down to the creek was only a short 
walk, and I could step over to Uncle George's in 
a minute or so. When I went out to see the woods- 
pasture, the scene of my early crimes and adven- 
tures, I had to laugh ; it was so pathetically small, 
only half an acre. The front porch had con- 
tracted so that there was hardly room to sit on it, 
and the upper portico was the tiniest place imag- 
inable. In addition to this all of my relatives had 
dwindled down to be just ordinary mortals, not 
great and marvellous any more, but clay, as I was 
clay. 

There is a great revelation in this. It is that 
the world, and all that therein is, is majestic, im- 
posing, and full of glory and romance, in propor- 
tion as you are young; and that all disillusion, 
despisings and world-weariness mean simply that 
you are growing old. 

A lot of what we call wisdom and experience is 
no more than doddering senility, withering age. 

There are some who never seem to lose their 
feeling of wonder at the world. These are the 
eternally young. Whom may God bless! 

One passage in letters embodying this idea oc- 
curs to my memory. It is Thomas Hood's verse : 

I remember, I remember, 
The fir trees dark and high ; 

22 



I used to think their slender tops 
Were close against the sky; 

It was a childish ignorance, 
But now 'tis little joy 

To know I'm farther off from heaven 
Than when I was a boy. 



23 



UNIFYING FORCES 

The curse is Isolation. The healing is Unity. 

As human beings drift away into separation 
they develop morbidity, and as they merge into 
mankind they become sound. 

The deepest joys are the joys common to the 
race. 

All pain is individual; there is no world-sorrow. 

The lonely become sensitive, their vanity be- 
comes sore, their corners and crankiness increase, 
they grow sour, perverse, peevish. 

Pessimism is a form of loneliness. All pessi- 
mistic souls cry out that the world does not under- 
stand them, that they are not appreciated. Who- 
ever strikes the deep note of joy has simply come 
into harmony with the millions. 

The struggle of the world is toward world- 
unity. The end of all great battles, taken as a 
whole, is to repress secession.. 

Every castle, clique, clan, sect, ecclesia, nation 
or party, is a thing to be at last overcome. 

Out of divisions arise hates, grudges, preju- 
dices. 

Bitterness is bred of narrowness. 

24 



The triumph of Bismarck, Richelieu, Garibaldi, 
and Lincoln was the triumph of Unity over Pro- 
vincialism. 

There must come other Bismarcks in the future 
who shall abolish nations. 

The European shall supplant the German, 
French, and Italian; the American shall take the 
place of the Canadian, Mexican, and the United 
States citizen; the Asiatic shall arise upon the 
disappearance of the Chinese and the Japanese. 

Possibly a long programme, a dimly distant 
goal; but not so far off as one might imagine. 

Already the great forces of modern life are 
non-national, are distinctly world-forces, bounded 
only by humanity. 

Commerce, for instance, knows no language, 
has no frontier, does not understand patriotism, 
is as catholic as Jesus. 

Science is not English nor French; it is as 
wide as mankind. The same authorities and ma- 
terials are found in the University of Tokio and 
the Rockefeller Institute. 

There will never be another language. 
The curse of Babel is disappearing. Diversity of 
tongues was due to provincialism. 

The OCEAN, which once separated, now unites 
the peoples of earth. 

The ARTS, such as music, painting, sculpture, 
architecture, are converging into world signifi- 
es 



cance; the charm of local color fades before the 
universal appeal. 

Transportation breaks down nation walls. 
The steam locomotive smashes through political 
barriers. 

Communication, the telegraph and telephone, 
"their line has gone out to all the earth." 

Over all boundaries soars the flying machine. 

And some day the world will work out the 
truth that religion is not sectarian, segregative, 
an ethnic enthusiasm, nor an organized party, but 
that it is human. 

The creed of the youth of humanity was that 
there is but one god; the creed of the adulthood 
of humanity will be that there is but one man- 
kind. 



2$ 



THE HARROWERS 

Here's a book by Hall Caine, entitled "The 
Woman Thou Gavest Me," just out, guaranteed 
to irritate every nerve, bruise every tender place 
In 'your heart, offend you, 'agitate you, and make 
you want to fight somebody. 

Why In the name of all that's decent anybody 
wants to read such stuff your deponent sayeth not. 
Chickens eat pebbles, some southern whites eat 
clay, and English sparrows eat of the dirt of the 
highway; but why a human being wants to eat 
mental food that turns his mental teeth, nauseates 
his spiritual stomach, and gives him a fit of emo- 
tional ptomaine poisoning it Is hard to say. 

If "The Woman Thou Gavest Me" isn't har- 
rowing enough for you, let me recommend "The 
Children of the Dead End," an English affair, 
pure dreadfulness, without a ray of humor or a 
touch of real happiness. Unmitigated gloom. 
Unrelieved wretchedness. 

When you finish it, if you do, you will certainly 
want to go out in the garden and eat worms. 

All of which raises the question : Why do peo- 

27 



pie like books and plays that distress and oppress 
them? 

Also, why is it the thing to call a particularly 
gloomy and dyspeptic piece of literature great? 

My own notion is this : and I fling it in the teeth 
of the critics, and be hanged to 'em ! 

The expression of gloom, the depiction of cru- 
elty, the expatiation upon horrors is the cheapest 
and nastiest short cut to creating a sensation and 
acquiring a reputation. 

It is the favorite way of beginners. Most 
young poets write of death and heartbreak. 
Most young story-tellers are experts in plain and 
fancy agonies. Some of them get over it. Many 
don't. 

I don't like sickly sweet stories, but surely the 
great masters of literature, in all their tragedies 
as well as in their comedies, were healthy and 
human. They made you feel that it is good to be 
alive and greet the sun. 

The world and the hearts of men need joy; 
they need to feed their imagination upon high and 
wholesome visions. 

They do not need literature that gives them the 
pip. 

So, author, if you have anything to say that 
may lighten us up a bit, anything that may give 
us a new grip on life, anything that may strengthen 
our faith that "God's in His heaven, all's right 
with the world," come, write. 

28 



But if your heart is dry, your cerebellum 
soured, and your soul ready to throw up its sick 
existence, why, get thee to a brewery! Why 
should'st thou be a breeder of books? 



29 



THE CURE OF DISTANCES 

Whenever I get worried about things, about 
the cook, or the neighbors, or the children, or 
politics, or other sublunary concerns that some- 
times impose their importance upon finite minds, 
I like to go and talk with my old friend the as- 
tronomer. 

He cures me with his distances. When he talks 
of his suns and stars and other sky matters I lose 
my little troubles, as you shed your clothes when 
you take a plunge into the ocean. 

The other day I said to him that I did not like 
to walk or ride unless I had some particular des- 
tination ; I did not like to go without going some- 
where. 

He smiled and said: "Nobody knows where 
he IS going. Where are we all, where is this 
earth, going? Some say we are headed for the 
blue sun called Vega. None of us living mortals 
will ever know, for we would not arrive there for 
some fourteen million years." 

"How fast are we travelling?'' 

"Oh, about twenty kilometres a second. But 
that is not high speed for the heavenly roadway. 

30 



In fact, this world's chauffeur is just poking 
along." 

*'Afraid of an accident?" 

"Possibly; for all the stars in the Milky Way, 
and there are two or three hundred million of 
them, are whizzing ahead, every one of them at 
high speed." 

*'And not a soul of them knowing where he's 
bound fori Every one of them saying with Mr. 
Dooley, We don't know where we're going, but 
we're on our way.' " 

"That's it. And, speaking of speeding, there 
are some of those sky fellows who are really hit- 
ting it up. There's the star 1830 Groombridge, 
for instance, that is making 241 kilometres a sec- 
ond, and the nebula in Andromeda goes at the 
rate of 325 kilometres a second; but these are 
exceeded by a little star discovered by Lalande, 
which traverses space at more than 331 kilos per 
second, and by Arcturus, which is bowling along, 
all six cylinders wide open, at 413 kilos a second. 
Why, it would not take this last star over two 
million years to cut clear across our universe." 

"You don't say!" I had already acquired con- 
tempt for a mere two million. 

"These extra fast stars," continued the astron- 
omer, "doubtless do not belong to our universe. 
They seem to be out of their way." 

"I do hope they will be careful. There are 
other universes then, so to speak?" 

31 



"Maybe; separated from ours by incompre- 
hensible distances, and not connected with ours by 
an ether capable of carrying their light to us. 
Man may never see them. Still, if they exist, then 
three hundred million or so of suns that compose 
our universe may be moving toward some point 
in them.'' 

When I went home and my wife asked me to 
explain why it is that the cook always leaves the 
lid of the icebox open, I replied to her: 

"Woman, it is a mystery. But Vm not going 
to worry over it now. I am occupied with con- 
jectures and queries which demonstrate how lim- 
ited still is our patrimony of human knowledge, 
constrained and astonished before the fearsome 
enigma of the universe." 

"Yet," said she, "the ice is out, and what are 
you going to do about it? We have company for 
dinner." 

"In forty-one million years it will make no dif- 
ference," I answered. 

And for once I had the last word. 



32 



THE LAUGHERS 

I HAVE a grand remedy which I wish to recom- 
mend to all suffering humanity. 

1 have tried It myself. A number of my ac- 
quaintances have tried It. All speak highly of the 
benefits received. It has helped others, why not 
you? 

It Is LAUGHTER. 

Not smiling, not mere good humor, but laugh- 
ter, the kind that explodes, shakes you, and goes 
on exploding and shaking like a rapid-fire gun, 
until the massed battalions of worry are shot to 
pieces. 

To laugh is probably the best medicine ever 
discovered. One hearty laugh Is better than a 
wagon-load of roots and yarbs, better than seven 
drug stores full of dope. 

"There is not," says the London Healthy *'the 
remotest corner or little inlet of the minute blood 
vessels of the body that does not feel some wave- 
let from the great convulsion produced by the 
hearty shaking of the central man. The blood 
moves rapidly, and probably its chemical, elec- 
trical, or vital condition, is distinctly modified." 

33 



In other words, one good laugh Is equal to a 
dose of salts, two cocktails, a bromo-seltzer, and 
a spoonful of quinine. 

If you have got into such a condition that noth- 
ing can make you have a fit of mirth, a regular 
whoopee, more's the pity. 

This Is rather an oppressive world; there are 
so many burdens and perplexities that any one is 
liable to be crushed. Laughter is nature's defense 
against the world burden. By laughter a man 
shakes off his pack, for a few minutes at least, 
and capers like a loose colt In the pasture. When 
he returns and is saddled again he is refreshed, 
is stronger. 

It doesn't make much difference what you laugh 
at. Children laugh at nothing at all, and are 
happier than we. 

Goldsmith says of a happy group that "what 
they lacked In wit they made up In laughter." 

One of the best laugh makers is the good 
STORY; not the pleasant little quip, but the "reg- 
ular scream,'* the kind that makes you hold your 
sides, rock to and fro, and yell. 

Pass It along. Save up two or three, and when 
you meet a friend, hand them to him. Who can 
tell how much health and sanity are created by 
the good stories that are continually going the 
rounds? 

Don't be afraid to laugh. Don't get out of 
practice. Laugh, and be human. 

34 



Not that you should be ever giggling, or set 
out to be a professional humorist, but rather that 
you should learn the Lincolnian art of knowing 
and being able to tell a *'good one" upon occasion. 

God bless the laughers! Their roar goes up 
from all the earth, the brave protest of the life 
force within us against the glooms and scarecrows 
of this fearsome world. 



35 



OD 



Do you know what Od is? 

Perhaps it isn't. Still whether it is or isn't, it's 
interesting. 

It is a kind of force which Reichenbach claimed 
to have discovered. It was supposed to be ex- 
hibited by peculiarly sensitive persons, streaming 
from their finger tips and the like, and by crystals 
and other bodies. This force, says the Century 
Dictionary, has been supposed to explain the phe- 
nomena of mesmerism and animal magnetism; but 
it rests upon no scientific foundation. 

Our sensitiveness to the touch is limited usually 
to the surface of the skin. The sharpest needle, 
so long as it does not touch us, makes no impres- 
sion, even at the nearness of the thousandth part 
of an Inch. 

But it has been shown that in a state of deep 
hypnosis certain persons acquire an extension of 
sensibility beyond the limits of the body and feel 
a touch or puncture made even at a distance. 

Certain "subjects," during the hypnotic state 
and the accompanying clairvoyance, succeed in 
perceiving pale luminous waves emanating from 

36 



the eyes of a human being, and from the nostrils, 
and from the extremities of the fingers, and the 
rest of the body seems also to glow as if wrapped 
in a thin phosphorescence. 

This Od has never received the O. K. stamp of 
the regular scientists, and perhaps the spirit deal- 
ers are trying to come it over us. 

But even while we hang up any opinion upon 
the matter, marking it "Important if true," as we 
have to deal with so many charming theories, still 
this Od hypothesis is interesting, fillips the stale 
fancy and incites to comparisons. 

I have known people who seemed to be over- 
running with something, call it Od or what you 
will. They feel slurs never meant, slights that do 
not exist, and suffer constantly from 'Voonds and 
broozes and petrifying sores," made by nothing 
and by intent of nobody. 

Lord help 'em ! And help any poor, miserable 
Odic creature whose sensitiveness spreads all over 
the place, so that when you are walking softly 
around him you are all the while treading on his 
toes! 

I used to have a considerable Odicity myself 
when young, and often lay awake o* nights suffer- 
ing from imaginary soul-wounds. I have grown 
callous. The only way you can hurt me now is 
with a brick. I sing the classic song, 

"Perhaps It was right to dissemble your love, 
But why did you kick me down stairs?" 

37 



And to all fellow Odics, who are everlastingly 
being hurt by everybody, I would say, as the 
ripest, richest contribution of my experience: 

"Nix on the projection of sensitiveness beyond 
the epidermis!'* 

Od may be flowing from my finger tips still, but 
the manicure girl doesn't seem to notice it; and 
shooting from my eyes, but my lady friends do 
not appear to be disturbed by it; and investing 
my body in a filmy phosphorescence, but it doesn't 
hurt. 

I have learned one thing. I wait until some- 
body hits me before I begin to feel pain. 



38 



WHAT THE STARS SAY 

In a poem by James Stephens, published in the 
periodical Platinum Prints, occur these lines: 

I think the stars do nod at me, 
But not when people are about; 

For they regard me curiously 
Whenever I go out. 

Brothers, what is it ye mean, 

What is it ye try to say, 
That so earnestly ye lean 

From the spirit to the clay? 

I may have been a star one day, 

One of the rebel host that fell ; 
And they are nodding down to say, 

Come back to us from hell. 

The stars are the greatest of preachers. Their 
line has gone out to all the earth. Their appeal 
is universal. Their silent message pours over the 
world of men as a continuous chrism. 

The greatest of teachers came to show us the 
star life, "the kingdom of the heavens." 

What do the stars tell of ? 

39 



Beauty. In all the scope of vision nothing Is 
so beautiful. No spectacle of day can equal the 
calm magnificence, the clustered loveliness, of the 
star people. They smile forever upon the ugli- 
ness of men's works, upon the unbeauty of muddy 
and troubled souls. 

Order. Each star moves In its set orbit. 
Through the long centuries they swing and stum- 
ble not upon their path. There Is no confusion. 
Orion and the Scorpion pass by in crystal har- 
mony. The fiery Bull is as tranquil as the Seven 
Sisters. The figures of the star dances are of In- 
conceivable Intricacy, yet so perfectly do they keep 
step that men can predict their places a thousand 
years hence. 

What must they think of this warring world? 
And of the strifes of men? Of the struggllngs, 
heartburnings, misunderstandings of us? What 
if in our relations with one another we could have 
such perfection of organization, such spirit of co- 
work? What if every business deal would profit 
both him that buys and him that sells? And what 
If with those we love there were that unbroken 
starlike accord? 

Mystery. Familiar strangers. Unknown 
lights that have shone upon us in childhood and 
will keep watch over our graves. Eternal food 
of wonder. Persistent reminders that life is great 
and high and divine, and not all earthly and com- 
monplace. 

40 



/ 



Infinity. They speak of distances that can- 
not be measured, of magnitudes that we cannot 
grasp, of that sacred symbol of grandeur — infin- 
ity. Here the stricken cry "Nevermore!" There 
the stars murmur in soft chorus "Forever and 
ever!" Here are limits. We dream of freedom, 
but we are as sleep-walkers, and nature thrusts 
our bounds against us, w^e strike our foreheads 
upon pillars of brass. There is the wide and open 
road of souls. No confines, no partings, no sa- 
tiety, no decay. 

These thoughts the stars have put into us. 
Blessed is the man who believes them. He shall 
have peace. 



41 



DO THY NEXT THING 

I HAVE received the following letter: 

"What, if I may ask, would be your advice to 
a young man who has reached the age of twenty- 
one, and who, after having for five years been 
possessed of the requisites for entrance into a col- 
lege, is as yet unable to decide on what profession 
to choose as his life work? 

^'Nothing, or rather everything, which in this 
case is equivalent to nothing, has appealed to his 
imagination, only to be thrown overboard the next 
day. He is bright, ambitious, a hustler, etc. 
"Very truly yours, 

"A Would-Be Counsellor." 

There are thousands of young men in this same 
case. There are, I believe, more who don't know 
what they want than there are who do know what 
they want. 

It is all very well to tell a young man to take 
up that calling to which he is best adapted, to fol- 
low the inward call and to do the work for which 
nature intended him; but what if he does not 
know? 

4^ 



There is but one thing to do. It Is to take 
events into partnership. That is to say, it is to 
believe that providence or destiny has something 
to do with one's career, to watch for what opens 
up, and to be ready to seize opportunity. 

Indecision is worse than making a mistake. 

Whatever presents itself, whether running a 
shoe-shining stand, or selling goods on the road, 
or teaching school, or studying law or medicine, 
go to It, If you have any inclination at all In that 
direction ; try It out, work faithfully, and see how 
it suits you. 

Nobody can tell you what to do. At the last, 
YOU must decide. There Is no getting away from 
this. 

And if you cannot decide for what you are 
fitted, then "do thy next thing." Do the first 
thing that you can turn up, and do it as well as 
you can. 

That will lead to something else. And to the 
thing you are designed for, eventually. 

Life IS determined by experiment. No man 
can sit down and plan It all out beforehand. It 
is like a path through the woods ; you can see but 
a little way at a time, but, if you GO ON, the far- 
ther distances and the ultimate goal by and by 
appear. 

Meanwhile don't forget that the worst of all is 

INDECISION. 



43 



OCTOBER 

Of all the twelve lovely girls in the year family 
give me October. 

It's every man to his taste, of course, but what 
could we talk about if we did not tell of what we 
like? 

So it's October for me. There's a crispness in 
her atmosphere, a health in her cool hand, and a 
vigor in her step that find me. 

Then it is you want to do, to commence, to 
begin again. All the languidly of August is 
chilled away. Variable September, that knows 
not her own mind, but shines, rains, and swelters 
by whim, has gone. October, firm-stepping and 
of jocund face, calls you, and you're up and away 
over the hills and into the woods with a stout 
heart. 

Of all the Invigorating vintages give me Octo- 
ber air. No brew nor distillation made by man 
can equal the refreshing stimulation of this lung 
beverage. It clears the head, brightens the eye, 
sharpens the brain, and unllmbers the legs. 

June has her soft beauties and May her shy 
greens and nascent blossoms, but what can equal 

44 



the imperial colors of October^s dress when the 
forests blaze with flame-dyed leaves, every tree 
is a miracle of rich hues, and the earth Is laid 
ankle deep In a rustling carpet? 

Take a mile of October for what alls you. 
Find a sturdy stick, walk the country road, cut 
through the pastures, climb the mountain side, and 
when you're tired out eat half a dozen apples and 
take a long drink from the spring; then shall all 
the megrims, distempers, worries, and bothera- 
tions fly away, and you will return home a real 
human being. 

If spring produces the madness of poetry In 
susceptible breasts, why not October? So here 
goes: 

O dear, clear October, 
Cold hand and fire heart, 

When there's frost on the meadow and the hearthstone's 
warm! 

O clean, strong October, 
You're bonny and you're wholesome, 
And I'd rather kiss your cool lip than June's warm 
mouth. 

O ruddy-cheeked October, 
Blue's your eye and fresh as morning. 
And your hair blows like the sunset with a yellow maple 
flame. 

45 



Oh, night of October, 
You smell all of nuts and apples, 

And I see the moon, like fire, between the haystack and 
the barn. 

O wayward, sweet October, 
There's wine and there's cider. 

And the sun strolls through the day with his eye half 
shut. 

Then love me in October, 
When the air is like champagne, 

And the life that's falling in the leaf is rising in the 
blood. 



46 



ON TIME 

Perhaps you think you don't amount to much. 
If so, there is one little excellence you may ac- 
quire; it won't cost you a cent and will give abun- 
dant pleasure to all persons you have to do with. 

It is the virtue of being on time. 

No matter whether you are black or white, 
giant or dwarf, handsome or plain, wise or ig- 
norant, rich or poor, male or female, it makes no 
difference; if you can't be a thing of beauty, you 
can be a joy forever, by the simple trick of being 
there at the minute you said you would be there. 

I sometimes think the greatest character in fic- 
tion is the Count of Monte Cristo, who when he 
said he would arrive at 12 o'clock noon, opened 
the door precisely upon the sixth stroke of the 
clock at midday. 

The man who is late is selfish. For his own 
pleasure, or for his indolence and carelessness, he 
keeps others waiting. 

He is also an egoist. He thinks more of his 
own convenience than of the comfort of others. 

He is also a nuisance. 

It makes no matter whether you be an office 

47 



boy or the boss. Nine o'clock means 9 o'clock, 
not half past nine. 

For myself I profess I have no stomach for 
waiting. When some one sends for me to come 
at a certain hour, arid when I arrive at the set 
time, and have to sit thirty minutes in an ante- 
room, cooling my heels and twiddHng my thumbs, 
I have a strong inclination to go out and join the 
Amalgamated Bomb Throwers' Association. 

There are ladies — ^but perhaps I would better 
not say what is in my mind. Late to get up, late 
to go to bed, late at breakfast, late at dinner, and 
late at supper, late to the train, late to church, 
late to the theatre — ^well, what of it? We adore 
them just the same. The queen can do no wrong. 

But let not any mere man try this! Just be- 
cause his betters can be late with impunity is no 
excuse for his arrogating to himself such royal 
privilege. 

Whosoever causes others to wait has committed 
a grievous insult. Woe to the railway whose 
train is two hours late, causing countless passen- 
gers to suffer in station houses with nothing to eat 
but peanuts and nothing to read but lying time- 
tables ! Woe unto the man who makes the other 
ten members of the board sit idle because they 
cannot do business without him ! Woe to the doc- 
tor or lawyer who sits reading a newspaper while 
the outer office is filled with tortured humanity! 
Woe to the man who makes a date with you at 3 

48 



o'clock and arrives at 4, just as you are ready for 
the next comer I Woe to the guest who promised 
to be at the dinner on time, and comes only when 
the viands are cold and the company is hot I Woe 
unto all the late I 

For surely the recording angel has a long, deep, 
black mark against them. 



49 



A RAINY DAY 

To those of us who love Nature each of her 
changing moods is adorable. We love a soft 
morning when 

"Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops." 

We love a sweltering summer noon, when the 
earth reels with life under the hot love of the sun. 
We love a winter midnight, when the stars glisten 
steely and acres of white snow He dim and lus- 
trous under rampant Orion. We love the flaunt- 
ing banners of sunset, the stillness of a quiet eve- 
ning, the roar of storms, the voices of the wind; 
in all that the sky does It expresses the wayward 
movlngs of the soul. It helps us know ourselves. 

But nothing seems so intimate as a rainy day; 
not splashed with rain, but a day when it*s rainy 
as you get up and take your first look out of the 
window; a slow drizzle, a steady downpour, as if 
it always had rained and is going to rain forever 
and ever. 

It makes the household cosy. At the breakfast 

50 



table we love each other a little more. Nature 
has shut out the world and the family cuddles 
closer. 

It gives many strange, new color values to the 
view. It is pouring now, and as I look out over 
the trees across the way they are blurred; they 
are phantom trees, with mystery glooming 
through them. 

One tall old elm stands with upraised arms, for 
all the world like some rapt Brahmin imploring 
the upper infinite, like the very spirit of earth 
transfixed in prayer. 

The sky is not light, but is as if translucent 
with the ghost of light. The brilliant vastness of 
a sunny day is not there, but the heavens seem 
to have stolen nearer during the night, and now 
brood over us, mothering the earth. 

The rain-drops fall, innumerable little messen- 
gers, words of musical water, which is life, com- 
ing upon bush and garden, street and roof, 
myriads and to spare. It is the overplus of Na- 
ture's generosity. It is the infinite giving its 
breast to its child, the finite. The placid earth is 
sated. 

A rainy day has its own sounds. All the noises 
of things, of men's voices, footsteps, of bird-cries, 
of wheels, of cattle and horses and dogs, sound 
blanketed, half smothered in the velvet wrapping 
of the rain. 

Get your book and sit in the window — and then 

51 



let the book drop and gaze out into the hazy air, 
and your thoughts will fly, perhaps into places of 
tears in the past, perhaps far away where is one 
whose face is a tender vision, perhaps into the 
future to your cloud-shrouded castles in Spain. 

It is well to be sunny and bright, but there are 
moods also when the soul is glad of rain, and of 
all the gentle melancholy that rain bespeaks. 



52 



BOOKS AND WHATS ON THEM 

**I speak/' said the college professor, **as one 
who loves books. 

"If there Is one master-passion of my life It Is 
books. To me they are real people, not dead 
things. 

"And I haven't a de luxe book on my shelves. 

"I am not poor. I make a fair living and have 
a satisfactory house to shelter me, a good bed, 
and plenty to eat. I even have laid up some 
money. 

"So I could have rare editions If I wanted them. 
I do not. 

"I don't think any the more of a woman be- 
cause she Is spattered with diamonds and wears a 
$500 Imported gown. I don't think any the more 
of a house with gold door knobs, of a bedstead 
with solid silver posts, nor of a book that Is bound 
In gilt and morocco. 

"Everywhere the tendency of great riches Is to 
vulgarity. The most vulgar elements of society 
are not the laborers, clerks, domestic servants, 
and all the horde of people with limited educa- 

S3 



tion. On the contrary, it is among these we often 
find the rarest loyalty, nobility of heart, thought- 
fulness, and the other virtues that belong to the 
genuine spiritual aristocracy. 

''Real vulgarity consists in ostentation, in petty 
forms of display, in needless luxury, in putting 
upon things values that arise not from their use- 
fulness or beauty, but from their cost — hence the 
exclusiveness implied by their possession. 

"It is as hard for a rich man not to be vulgar 
as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. 

"A woman with her fingers stiff with flashy 
rings IS vulgar. To own troops of dogs and 
horses, merely to be known as owning them, is 
vulgar. To give dinners at $20 a plate is vulgar. 
The whole troop of night-life people squandering 
money in the lobster palaces are vulgar. To use 
one's wealth in owning and keeping up a million- 
dollar house, with troops of servants and a half 
dozen automobiles, instead of devoting one's 
money in some human way toward making chil- 
dren, women and men healthier, wiser, and hap- 
pier is vulgar. It is all as cheap and common as 
a Sioux brave's pleasure in a red blanket. 

"I can't expect to keep the soiling hands of 
patronage off other things, but I wish to heaven 
I could keep them off books. 

"Books are the prophets, the spiritual helpers 
of life. They constitute the eternal democracy. 
So I say, let them be dressed in modest and hon- 

54 



est covers, let them be robed in simple dignity, as 
Haggai or John the Baptist. 

*'I have little sympathy for the people who are 
swindled into paying $5,000 for a set of books 
worth $50. They are the victims of their own 
love of vulgar display. 

"It is not those who love books for what is in- 
side them that are buncoed by the de luxe game." 



55 



WHY I LOVE YOU 

Thus said a lover to his lass: 
Why do I love you? 

1. I don't know. 

2. I never intended to love you. I did not 
deliberately set about it. Love came to me — "out 
of the nowhere." I was struck by it as by a stray 
bullet. It seems a kind of divine accident. 

3. It is not because you are beautiful. You 
were not beautiful — to me — until I loved you. 
Now every feature of you Is beautiful, every way 
you have. Beauty does not beget love; love be- 
gets beauty. 

4. I love you because you are different from 
all other persons in the world. Love has indi- 
vidualized you. You are as peculiar to me as I 
am to myself. You seem a rare pearl the like of 
which nobody except me ever found. You are a 
treasure trove. 

5. I love you because you will not let me be. 
You haunt me, follow me, dwell forever In the 
back of my mind. I cannot get rid of you. I am 
conscious of you, standing there among my 
thoughts, even as I am conscious of myself. 

6. Nothing you have done makes me love you. 
Please do not ever try to do anything to make me 
love you. All you need is to be yourself. The 

S6 



more nearly you come to perfectly, freely express- 
ing yourself the more charming you are. 

7. Any adornment you put on interferes. 
Any effort you put forth to make yourself attrac- 
tive is a false note. Your jewels, ribbons, rings 
— I merely endure them. The more completely 
you are just yourself the more you appeal to me. 

8. I love you because going on living without 
you would be unbearable. You have entwined 
yourself in my destiny. We are not two separate 
units side by side. We have combined into one 
personality by a sort of spiritual chemistry. We, 
having loved, are as different from what we were 
before lovers fire fused us as water is different 
from the two gases that compose it. 

9. I love you because you have captured my 
future. 

10. I love you because you have changed the 
world. Once it was a mere place; now it is a 
home, comfortable, warm, light. 

11. I love you because you arouse my better 
self. Your love keeps me from lapsing into a 
lower plane. You make me generous, loyal, 
thoughtful, punctilious in honor, patient, strong. 
When I think of you I must be the best I can be. 

12. I love you because to me you are the most 
significant expression of the eternal. In your face 
I see the infinite. Through you, by you, I climb 
up from the brute to the human. Through you 
I get glimpses of the divine. 

57 



THE SPARROW 

He was a poet. Not that he had ever written 
any poetry. But he was full of it. Many who 
write reams of rhymes are not poets. And per- 
haps the best poets do not write at all. 

I met him on a park bench. I was feeding the 
English sparrows. I love the little beggars, I 
suppose, because every man's hand is against 
them. He was rolling a cigarette with Spanish 
dexterity. He lit it and proceeded to read a 
paper, a last evening's paper, much crumpled. 

We got to talking. Little by little these items 
appeared in his talk. 

He had slept last night in the park. It was 
fine. Plenty of fresh air. Of course you have to 
dodge the policemen, but there are lots of dark 
corners that make excellent lodgings. 

Cold? Some. Yet newspapers are the warm- 
est kind of bedclothes. No one can appreciate 
the value of the daily paper until he has slept in 
it. 

Isn't it grand that a great city furnishes quar- 
ters for the down-and-outers? Green grass and 
a tree for the tramp — a noble charity — or rather 

58 



not a charity at all, but the people providing for 
their unfortunate. 

Meals he got in saloons at the free lunch coun- 
ter. He did not drink much, just a little beer, 
for alcohol upset him; but he could go into a 
saloon, buy a five cent glass of beer, and satisfy 
his hunger at the free lunch counter. He had al- 
ways found barkeepers very cordial and human. 
He didn't believe people realized the good sa- 
loons do by saving men from sheer starvation. 

The best thing he had found in the city, how- 
ever, was the public library. Often he spent days 
there. It was comfortable, luxurious. 

You can go in, he said, and read all day. The 
attendants are as polite to you as if you were a 
millionaire. 

Ask for books on any subject and they get them 
for you. They give you a seat. They wait on 
you. If they are delayed in attending to your 
wants they ask your pardon. Gee ! but it makes 
you feel classy! 

There are all the newspapers and magazines. 
You have free access to them. 

There are places to wash your hands and face. 
They check your hat and coat. No tips. Talk 
about your exclusive clubs; it's me for the Inclu- 
sive club, the club where any human being is wel- 
come. 

No ; he had no job. He was doing some study 
in Asiatic love-poetry. No; he didn't expect to 

59 



sell It anywhere. He was just studying because 
he liked it. 

He was as happy, care-free, and idle as the 
English sparrows fluttering about us. 

When he left me I felt as If I had been talking 
with one of the birds. And as my burden re- 
turned, the affairs that weighed on me, the re- 
sponsibilities and problems, I laughed outright 
and said : 

"Why worry? Behold the fowls of the air!" 



60 



DUCKBACKERS 

A DucKBACKER is a person who goes through 
any experience and learns nothing from it. 

The human soul feeds on events. To the soul 
all words, views, impressions are as water to re- 
fresh it. Yet there are those from whom all in- 
fluences slide off like water from a duck's back. 
Hence the name, Duckbacker. 

The genus Duckbacker is found in all parts of 
the explored world, and in Boston. 

There is the Duckback Bore. He sits, he re- 
mains, he goes not. You pelt him with all man- 
ner of hints, gentle hints, small and pointed hints, 
hints big and obvious as shells from a Krupp. 
There he sits smiling. Nothing but a steam 
shovel will remove him. 

Sensitive persons have been criticized. But Fd 
rather live with a Thinskinner than with a Duck- 
backer. 

There arc Duckbacker Travellers. They re- 
turn from foreign parts as provincial as before 
they ever left Tie Siding. I knew a family once 
— a mother, father, and daughter; I travelled 
with them upon a transatlantic steamer and was 

6i 



thrown with them a week in Italy; they never 
ceased to lament leaving Hoboken; Naples, Sor- 
rento, Amalfi, Pompeii, what were all these com- 
pared to Hoboken? 

James Whitcomb Riley tells us of the man who 
confessed, "the more I travel round the more I 
hain't got no sense." 

The Dial recently spoke of literary non-ab- 
sorbers "who emerge from the end of a volume 
as little conversant with its contents as when they 
plunged in at the beginning." 

Haven't you met those amazing book-excursion- 
ists, the Cookies of literature, who have read 
every author you mention, and never seem to know 
anything about any one of them? What a deluge 
of ideas they have passed through — ^with dry 
skins ! 

And how can people go to church so regularly 
and never catch any spot of greatness? 

There are great big ideas booming around us 
all the time ; but how many of us live on, in smug 
convention, in bomb-proof trenches, nibbling plati- 
tudes! 

The wretched teacher, what can she do with her 
Duckbacker pupil, whom she has told the same 
thing forty times, yet who remains utterly unwet 
from her rain of information! 

The Duckbackers, the Duckbackers, they invade 
the opera and the music never reaches them ; they 
sit unmoved at the theatre while the actor pours 

62 



out his passion; they are impervious to the arts 
of love at home and to the arrows of ridicule 
abroad; they are not disgusted with tyrannies, not 
angered by injustice, not inspired by noble natures, 
not touched by the misery of their fellows, and it 
Is doubtful if heaven will please them or hell 
scorch them. 

They are armored souls, encysted brains, crav- 
enette personalities. 

Thank your stars If you have ever been soaked 
with an Idea, drowned by a passion, swept away 
by an influence, drenched by pity, or dissolved by 
love I 

Down with the DuckbackersI 



63 



WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW 

We do not know what anything is. Nobody 
knows. Probably nobody ever will know. 

We are set in a world of substances and forces 
which are absolutely incomprehensible. All we 
can do is to dodge about among them until finally 
our life force, which we understand not at all, 
ceases. 

We do not know what matter is, what an atom, 
a molecule, or an electron is. 

We do not know what electricity is. We can 
use it. We can adjust ourselves to the way it 
acts. But we can never know its entity. 

The greater and more necessary a thing is the 
farther we come from knowing what it is. Just 
as the Irregular verbs in a language are the most 
common, so the commonest factors in life are the 
most baffling. 

For Instance, nothing is more incomprehensible 
than LIFE. No scientist has ever yet succeeded in 
creating It, notwithstanding It Is announced every 
once in a while that the experiment has been per- 
formed. 

We do not know what love is, though life is 

64 



charity, the remedy of evil conditions, the love 
that helps, the sympathy that redeems the world. 

Pain is not punishment. It is the nerve of hu- 
manity. It is a phase of that deep law which 
decrees that I cannot be happy until all mankind 
is happy. I can have no peace in my sheltered 
corner until there is peace on earth, and I can 
enjoy no sequestered good will until there is good 
will to men — to the remotest corner of the globe. 

Pain is the redemptive function of love. 

It is not enough for me to learn that sin is 
ugly; my lesson is not learned until I discover that 
sorrow is beautiful. 

In the crypt of sorrow lie the garments of maj- 
esty. Well for the soul that enters and puts 
them on. 



69 



A CHRISTMAS CARD 

My Friend: What do I mean when I call 
you My Friend? 

I mean that in some way in this world that 
seems so full of chance, yet through which I am 
persuaded there runs a deep and intelligent pur- 
pose, you and I have been thrown together. We 
came to know each other. 

And when we touched, you and I, two human 
atoms in this big universe, we took fire a little: 
I liked you; you liked me. Why, none can tell; 
it is just one of those wondrous miracles that 
happen in this wondrous life. 

That fire still burns In me. I want you to 
know I am still your friend. The sight of you 
this day, the sound of your voice, the touch of 
your hand, would make me happy. 

I don't like to grow away from my friends. 
Life is so crowded and necessary business so ab- 
sorbing that well beloved faces drift Into the gray 
fog of forgotten days. 

But Christmas comes and reminds me that the 
best part of my life consists in Its friendships. So 
I send this to you, in the hope that you may kindle 

70 



valueless without it. We know its phenomena, 
but not itself. 

We do not know what God is, nor what re- 
ligion, fear, hope, courage, and goodness are. 

We do not know what we ourselves are, our 
real person, our ego; nor whether it continues 
after death or goes out like a candle. We may 
believe, but we cannot know. 

The things we positively know are all of small 
consequence. We know that two and two make 
four and similar mathematic facts. But as to the 
big things that make up our daily existence, they 
are just as strange as spooks or fevers. 

Life is an art, not a science. An art is some- 
thing we learn by doing; a science is something 
we learn by knowing. 

Those who seek satisfaction, therefore, by seek- 
ing to know all are doomed to disappointment. 
The best things and the most useful can only be 

BELIEVED and USED. 

You must believe your wife and your friends 
love you, and you must learn how to use that love. 
You can never know. It is not knowable. 

You believe the train on which you ride will 
not be wrecked, you believe you will not be killed 
in an accident as you walk the street, you believe 
the food you eat is good for you, you believe the 
sun will rise to-morrow, you believe your business 
will prosper. Almost all the matters that make 
up your life are of belief, not knowledge. 

6s. 



We all live by faith. Everybody has faith in 
the little commonplace things. The great soul 
has faith in the vast invisible things and forces, 
such as the triumph of goodness or the invariable 
profit of honesty. 

It is not true, therefore, that some live by faith 
and some by facts. The two real classes are those 
who live by faith in the things that make up the 
life of the body, and those who live by faith in 
the laws also of the spirit and mind. 

It is not faith versus unfaith. It is little faith 
versus great faith. 



66 



WHY PAIN 

*'I BELIEVE,'' said a woman to me, "that when 
any one suffers it Is because sometime, somewhere, 
he has done wrong." 

Thus she stated a creed that Is very commonly 
held. It Is that every sin Is punished. And that 
sort of thing they call law, Inexorable law, that 
none can escape. 

Of course any one can believe this If he wants 
to. This is a free country. You can believe the 
moon Is green cheese, and no one can rob you of 
the blessed consolation of that faith. 

But there are some of us who take no comfort 
in faith In alleged "facts" which are entirely with- 
out other foundation than our own credulity. 

Speaking for myself, I find no such thing as 
punishment In nature. I find "consequences" — a 
wholly different matter. 

As for pain, sometimes it Hghts upon the guilty, 
but quite as often It attacks the Innocent. 

It is not a punishment for evil. It Is the result 
of evil, and that result may visit the guiltless 
while the rascal escapes. 

This is so true that if you believe pain is 2^ 

67 



judgment of the Ruler of the universe upon the 
lawbreaker you make that Ruler capricious and 
unjust. The grafter laughs and grows fat. His 
wretched victims shiver and hunger. 

The greatest pain is vicarious. It is suffered 
by the guiltless for the guilty. 

The criminal as a rule is too stupid or warped 
to experience the agony that his good mother can 
feel. 

In the present European war the criminals (the 
statesmen and rulers who brought on the war) 
are riding around in automobiles or sipping turtle 
soup cosily at home; the victims in the trenches, 
disembowelling one another in causeless rage, are 
not the guilty ones. They suffer vicariously. 

The fact is that the better a person is the more 
sensitive he becomes to the pangs of conscience. 
Hence while the drunken, trifling thief of a hus- 
band eats well and sleeps soundly, it is his poor 
wife who lies awake and has no appetite because 
of her torment at conditions. 

Guilt as a rule is brutal, dull, hard, unfeeling. 
It is honesty, purity, loyalty, and integrity that 
have nerves. 

Jesus is the type of the good man everywhere. 
He suffered for the sins of others. 

And always it is the rule of life that the great- 
souled, high-natured people must take the brunt 
of the pain caused by the coarse and low. 

Thus through pain come the outreachings of 

68 



a little to-day at the thought of me, that you may 
have a little wish that I were near you, and that 
you and I may meet at least in thought. 

I am not sending you any ^'present." I am 
sending you what is better — genuine heart-throbs. 
They are through and through these lines. If 
you hold the paper close to your own breast, I am 
sure you can feel them. 

The days when we were together, I have not 
lost them ; they are with me now, walking through 
my memory, not like sad ghosts, but like smiling 
angels, to remind me that once I stood soul to 
soul with one who liked me and whom I liked, 
and we marched bravely and blithely a few steps 
in this untoward world. 

Think of those days when you read this, and 
reach out your hand and touch mine across the 
distance of years and miles. 

I meet enough people who do not like me nor 
what I do. The world has plenty of the destruc- 
tive forces of envy, misunderstanding, and antip- 
athy. Nobody gets along with everybody. But 
you and I belong to that great Invisible Order of 
Friends. We stand against the world. We feel 
eternity. If we do not meet in this life again, 
we will surely meet in the next, and on some peace- 
ful star our laughter shall ring out free there, 
where there is no shadow of parting. 

Then hail to you, my friend ! And the best of 
life for you ! Contentment and love be yours, and 

71 



plenty of good work to do ! May your heart be 
always brave ! May your nature grow richer in 
all that happens to you ! 

And may we meet again, and let it be soon and 
often, to *'knit up the ravelled sleeve" of friend- 
ship! 



72 



THE TO-MORROW MIND 

The other night the workshops of Thomas A. 
Edison burned down, entailing a loss of millions 
of dollars. He Is sixty-seven years old. 

The same night an interviewer asked him about 
the catastrophe. 

*T am not thinking about that now/' he replied. 
**I am thinking of what I am going to do to-mor- 
row." 

The mind of the great achiever is a to-morrow 
mind. 

The mind of the failure is a yesterday mind. 

Which way is your face set? 

If it is toward the future you are living in sun- 
shine; for the sun always shines for to-morrow 
folk. 

If it is toward the past you get doubt, cold, 
and fog; for yesterdays are always a little sad. 

Life is one defeat after another. The more 
energy you have the more hard knocks you re- 
ceive. One type of man after a blow sits down 
and cries; the other type wipes the blood from 
his face and fights on. 

73 



Walking they say is a succession of falls for- 
ward. 

It is not a question of whether we shall suc- 
ceed or fail. We all fail. The vital question is: 
What are you going to do with failure? 

No rebuff can stay the indomitable soul. No 
triumph can stiffen the backbone of the whiner. 

There are women who never rise from their 
first bereavement. To them loyalt}'- means the 
eternal shadow. To bury the past appears to 
them cold and heartless. But they need to learn 
that the past exists but as soil from which to grow 
the future; the past is significant only in its bear- 
ing upon the future. The past is the dead mold; 
the future is the living lily. 

There are few men of business who have at- 
tained success who have not had to go back and 
begin again many a time. 

The cruelty of fate is powerless against the un- 
daunted heart. 

Mr. Edison has done the world good by his 
inventions; but he has served us all still more 
deeply by showing us a to-morrow mind, which, 
in the presence of a calamity that would have sent 
most sixty-seven-year-old minds to the scrap heap, 
turns smilingly to the future. 

The peculiar greatness of America is in that it 
lives for the future, while other nations look to 
the past. Their pride is in their ancestry; ours 
in our posterity. 

74 



For to-morrow Is big with promise, full of 
spirit ozone, strong with intellectual dynamics, 
rich in the elements of happiness. 

Yesterday is dead. 

"Let the dead bury their dead!'* 



75 



THE FEAR OF FAILURE 

More lives are spoiled by the Fear of Failure 
than by Failure itself. 

Failure never necessarily hurts anybody, we can 
up and come again after almost any defeat; but 
the Fear of Failure, lurking in the blood, means 
inefficiency for hand, brain, and heart. 

Expect to Fail. Don't be afraid of it. Every 
man fails. And the great Masters of the world 
have made the greatest Failures. Only they re- 
formed their lines and charged again. 

Who can count the humiliations to which Rich- 
ard Wagner, musician in chief to mankind, was 
subjected! His life reads one continuous succes- 
sion of defeats. The magnificent chorus of his 
final triumph is but sweetened by the minor chords 
of his suffering. 

How many times did Washington fail, and 
Galileo, and the marvellous minded Newton! 
But out of their downfallings came not soreness 
but hardness, not tears but clenched teeth. 

Just write this down in your copy book : "The 
right-minded man cannot fail at last." 

76 



If a man have Courage and Faith it is abso- 
lutely impossible for him to go under. 

Courage for a sword and Faith for a shield 
can overcome any possible bad luck. 

That does not mean that you will succeed in 
everything you undertake. It means something 
better than that; it means that if you fail in one 
thing you will be successful in other things of 
more worth. 

I know a person who has failed to get much 
money and to get high place, who is unknown save 
in his small corner, but he is nevertheless a High 
Tower for help and a Wide Tree for refresh- 
ment to all who know him. He is the most pro- 
found success I know. I would rather be sought 
and delighted in, as he is, than to sit on a throne. 

There are no failures in Nature. The dead 
body enriches the earth; the scattered flower 
petals leave the seed; the fallen forests of chiliads 
ago became coal; the waste of the stable is the 
food of the field; out of every incident of decay 
Nature fashions a new life force. 

What happens to me is no matter. Events are 
of no significance. What really counts is how I 
digest events. It is what happens in me, not to 
me. 

Come, folks, let us not whine any more Let 
us mouth no more about bad luck. Let us never 
again approach lifers tasks with the litany of fail- 

77 



ure on our lips, saying, "I know I shall not suc- 
ceed. I always fail." 

But say, *'I postulate myself against all turns 
of chance, I grasp the hand of Eternity and defy 
Time. My Brain, that can Think, my Heart, 
that can Love, and my Hands, that can Make, 
shall not give way nor to the decrees of Fate nor 
to the machinations of the Devil and all his Men. 

*'I am wired with God; no wind nor wave shall 
put out my light.'* 



78 



THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE 

To construct the mystical spirit sphere you must 
have four dimensions. 

1. The first Is the line, having but one dimen- 
sion, length. That Is right thinking. Unless 
there be truth, acknowledged and clung to by the 
mind, there can be no strong character. You 
must not believe a thing because It Is expedient, 
nor because it Is commanded, nor because others 
believe it; you must believe it for one reason only 
— ^because you are convinced that It Is true. Un- 
less your intellect Is right, you can have no assur- 
ance of health, either of body or of soul. 

2. The next figure Is the plane, having two 
dimensions, length and breadth. The spiritual 
analogy of this Is right thought plus right feeling. 
What was a cold mental conception now becomes 
warm ; It has received the touch of life. To love 
is to live. Right passion, based on right under- 
standing of the truth, means that to bare knowl- 
edge you have added vision, the perception of 
those veiled yet profoundly essential truths which 
can only be grasped by an intellect fired by emo- 
tion. 

79 



3- The third figure Is the cube, which has 
three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness. 
The cubic function of the spirit Is action. Right 
thought first, right love second, but these are 
never efficient until they are expressed In right 
action. When a man acts upon his Intelligent 
feeling he has become a four-square, solid being. 
Never till then has he real worth. Right actions 
react upon emotion and intelligence. If a man 
habitually does what he feels and knows to be 
right it clarifies his Intellect and rids him of dan- 
gerous heresies, and also strengthens and disci- 
plines his emotions. 

4. Above these three figures, more complex 
and perfect than they. Is the supreme shape of all 
— ^the sphere. It Is mysterious. It Is Immeas- 
urable. No man can construct a sphere equiva- 
lent to a given cube. He can only approximate. 
It Is divine; for all things which the Creator 
makes are In curves, except certain dead things, 
as quartz. All cell-life structures are In curves; 
so also the sun and the stars. There are no 
square stars. The curve Is the divine hall-mark. 
The spiritual equivalent of the sphere is^ — faith. 
Faith is not believing things that are not so, nor 
believing contrary to the intelligence; It Is the 
functioning of the higher Instincts of man's na- 
ture; It is the apperception of such qualities as 
goodness and nobleness, the realization of the 
power of the higher spiritual laws, such as "right 

80 



makes might/* "the truth shall conquer," "love 
your enemies/' "the meek shall inherit the earth," 
and similar truths, which, though they be the re- 
liable dynamics of all progress, are yet invisible 
to the eye wherein is no faith. 

Excellent as faith is, it is of no value unless it 
be the apex of right conduct, feeling and intelli- 
gence. But coming as the normal completion of 
these things, it makes of the human soul a sphere, 
perfect, solid, yet with the mystic quality of 
divinity. 



8i 



THE SECRET OF CONTENTMENT 

In a letter, with which some of my readers may 
be acquainted, written by Erasmus, he refers to 
Sir Thomas More and his house in Chelsea as 
follows : 

''More hath built near London upon the 
Thames side a commodious house, neither mean 
nor subject to envy, yet magnificent enough; there 
he converseth with his family, his wife, his son, 
and daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their 
husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is 
not any man so loving to his children as he; and 
he loveth his old wife as well as if she were a 
young m^aid; and such is the excellency of his tem- 
per that whatsoever happeneth that could not be 
helped, he loveth it as if nothing could happen 
more happily.'^ 

He would be a most self-esteeming author who 
would undertake to give a recipe universal for 
contentment; and yet so greatly is that quality 
desired among men and women that we all grasp 
at any hint, and follow eagerly any lead, that may 
give promise of our coming to it. 

Look, then, at these words of Erasmus and di- 

82 



gest them well, for one great sage writes of an- 
other, and both in the narrative and its subject the 
hungry mind may find some toothsome crumbs of 
wisdom. 

You will notice that More had four at least of 
the ingredients that make up human contentment; 
to wit, a competence, a large family, a loyal wife, 
and skill in adjustment. 

First, he had money enough to live comfort- 
ably. We may preach all we please upon the 
advantages of poverty, but most of us are not 
large enough of soul, and are made of clay not 
heroic enough, to be able to rise above the drown- 
ing forces of penury. Plain, ordinary mortals get 
along best with neither bleak want nor stuffy 
riches. We want — ^just enough. And are you 
now, son, preparing for your harvest of content- 
ment by diligent savings? Or are you one of 
those grasshopper-brained good fellows that spend 
all they make? Save a little every week, and thus 
prepare for yourself an old age "neither mean 
nor the subject of envy." 

Second, he had a large family. On the west- 
ward slope of fifty there is no want so biting as 
the want of children and grandchildren, loving 
you with blood-love, renewing youth ever in you, 
and continually reviving your flagging interest in 
the play of life. Marry when you are young, and 
have all the children you can. The contentment 
of the solitary, selfish and childless is hollow. 

83 



Third, he had an old wife that he loved "as 
well as if she were a young maid." Of all the 
loves of earth, that which is fullest of content- 
ment and granite happiness is the love you have 
grown old with. 

And lastly, "whatsoever happened that could 
not be helped. More loved as if nothing could 
happen more happily." There you have the open 
secret of all wise men, the kernel of the Oriental 
pundits, the gist of the Greek philosophers, the 
central idea of Christ; which is, that contentment 
is produced in the human breast not by chafing 
and pulling at events and circumstances to suit 
them to our desires, but by so training ourselves 
that we may skilfully adjust ourselves to whatever 
happens. 



84 



NATURE 

What a wonderful mother Is Nature I 

When we come fresh from her we have a 
charm the like of which we have never again. 
We drift all our lives farther and farther away 
from babydom, until at last Nature removes our 
spoiled bodies from her garden. 

She Is the first of all healers. Most maladies 
can be cured by going back to her four strong 
children, Sun, Water, Air, and Land. When they 
take us in their arms and kiss us with their cool 
lips all our little heats and excesses subside and 
we feel the renewing flood of life. 

She Is the mender of all things. Give her time 
enough and she will cover every ugly wall with 
vines, close up all wounds, spread her robe of 
green over the unsightly earth, and ornament and 
beautify like a woman in a house. 

She Is as mute as she Is wise. Her still, small 
voice Is not for every one. It takes long and 
patient listening to surprise her secrets. 

But once a soul comes to know them, how rich 
and restful they are ! You cannot tell them, write 
them down or teach them to another. They are 

8s 



too deep for language. All you can do Is to say 
to any inquirer, "Go where I have gone ; wait and 
listen!" 

The great poet, when he has heard the wide 
chorus of sea-voices, that "polyphloisboio bioio" 
of which Homer speaks, can only write down the 
impotency of his expression of so vast an emotion: 
*'Would that I could utter the thoughts that come 
to me!" 

You look at the stars long, and you turn away 
baffled, as you have felt an awful, complex flood 
of spiritual meaning you could not understand, 
that leaves you vaguely disturbed, as vaguely 
hushed and chastened. 

You look at the tree or the flower as if through 
a veil; some silent significance is there, but it is 
too subtle for our dull apprehension. Flesh and 
blood cannot receive it. 

When you come from your day in the fields, 
where you have sat among untamed plant life and 
gazed at the shy beauty of anemone and violet, 
and noted the darting rabbit, the squirrel, and the 
bluebird, you have the impression that you have 
glimpsed another sphere, a totally different world 
from ours, inhabited by swiftly moving creatures 
with strange, soft voices, who are talking of af- 
fairs of the fourth dimension, of spirit matters, 
remote from all we know. 

And perhaps the Eastern fancy of transmigra- 
tion is not so far from the mark, you say to your- 

86 



self, and ''the life beyond" may be that life of the 
wild things of the woods, of the insects of the 
air, or of the fish in the waters. Sometimes we 
sense in them a shadow of great affairs, of a so- 
ciety and business as full of interest as our human 
life, yet shut off from us by doors not to be 
opened. 

Except by death! Who knows, said a philos- 
opher, if after all life may be a dream and death 
an awakening? 

For death is a part of Nature's programme. 
She has fixed It for all living creatures, so it must 
be good. Since Nature manifestly means so well, 
as we see in a thousand ways, does it not argue 
that her crowning gift, death. Is not cruel, but 
very kind, the most motherly of all her acts; as 
if we, like little chicks, crawled back under the 
soft feathers of her breast? 

All I am and have comes from Nature; why 
should I protest when she takes me and mine back 
to her mysterious house? 



87 



ALLOWANCE 

• 

In all mortal affairs you have to make allow- 
ance. To be practical you must figure on any- 
thing being a little too long or a little too big. 
Nothing fits perfectly, except on paper, in theory. 

If you set aside $2,000 to buy an automobile 
it will probably cost you $2,500 by the time you 
have procured a new dufunny for the thingumajig 
and the necessary golf clubs that always go with 
the Jones-Johnson type of differentiated, reversi- 
ble, stem-winding carburetor. At least that is 
what the auto man says, and he doesn't laugh 
while he's saying it, either. 

If you get a piece of wood to go under the 
piano leg to keep the instrument from wobbling 
you always have to whittle it or get a larger piece. 

When you order a roast from the butcher you 
must buy several pounds more than is needed for 
the company. Hash for breakfast is saving the 
margin. 

If it takes four yards of goods to make a dress 
you have to get four yards and a half. 

Around every house the carpenters are build- 
ing, are scantling ends, laths, chips, and shavings. 

88 



The stone cutter's yard Is ankle deep with debris. 

If a locomotive Is to exert normally ten thou- 
sand horsepower it must be constructed with a 
capacity for fifteen thousand. 

You cannot put the ends of a railway directly 
in contact, you must leave a little room for the 
rails to "crawl." 

Your bureau drawers will not work If they can- 
not play. 

Neither can you get along with folks unless 
there is room to rattle a bit. Have rules for 
your children, of course, but give them a little lee- 
way. If they are to be abed by 8, don't get cross 
if they run over to 8.15. 

Be punctual, but not too blamed punctual. 
There is nothing that makes most men madder 
than a brass-bound, ground-glass stopper, officious, 
and pugnacious virtue. 

We all relish a little naughtiness and wayward- 
ness now and then, because It shows that the of- 
fender is not screwed up too tight, and Is not liable 
to get a hot box. 

In everything, except possibly corsets, there 
should be room. 

Let there be a marginal hour or two in your 
day, a little leisure Intermixed with your work. 
Don't allow yourself to be always pressed up to 
the limit. 

And when you love do not measure or econ- 

89 



omize. In love, If nowhere else, the more you 
waste the more you have. 

To be a little kind you must be kind a hundred 
times where it is not appreciated. 

To save one innocent man the law must let ten 
guilty ones escape. 

To be human you must make allowance. And 
there is nothing better than being human. 



90 



COMING DOWN AND GIVING UP 

The other day Herman Auerbach of New 
York murdered with a rifle his wife and his two 
daughters. Then he stretched himself out upon 
his own bed beside his dead wife and blew his 
head to bits. His deed was due, say the news- 
papers and the police, to the loss of his property; 
he was once rich and found himself growing poor; 
he preferred death to penury, both for himself 
and his family. 

This is a sharp-pointed instance of a very com- 
mon delusion. There are thousands, rich and 
poor, who share the poison belief of this unfortu- 
nate man. 

Briefly stated, the wretched creed is that it is 
not LIFE that matters, but station in life. Rus- 
kin called attention to this. 

Men and women seem to care little for life, 
handling it loosely and throwing it away often in 
the most amazing folly. They take chances gayly. 
They hear of railway wrecks, fires, and automo- 
bile disasters with indifference. They buy food 
blindly from food poisoners, take the unknown 
drugs they see advertised, and disregard the plain 

91 



precautions of health. Men fling themselves by- 
troops into battle, all the while knowing nothing 
of what It Is all about. In mines and factories 
life Is cheap. 

But station In life is quite another matter. To 
move from a fine house Into a cheap flat; to come 
down from silks and diamonds to ready-made 
suits; to drop from $10,000 to $1,000 a year — 
these are considered more bitter tragedies than 
death. 

The trouble with Ignoble souls Is that they can 
GIVE UP, but they cannot come down, as the 
country parson says. 

Yet one has not learned the first lesson in the 
art of living If he cannot adjust himself, as the 
player of his role, to whatever scene fate shifts 
for him, 

I know of no spectacle so pathetic as that of 
the multitudes who are struggling to keep up their 
position. Poor climbers! 

When pride keeps the house heartbreak dwells 
in it. 

How many a home is tormented, miserable, 
anxious, because above love and joy and laughter 
Is set ^'Keeping Up with the Joneses!" 

I never hear that dreadful explanation, "You 
know we have to live In this neighborhood and 
keep up this house, wear such clothes, and keep 
an automobile, to keep up with our station In 
life," without a chill going down my spine. 

92 



Thank God, I have no friends that are ashamed 
to come to see us in our small apartment! And 
those who would be attracted by a more expen- 
sive place I do not care to cultivate. I know 
enough snobs now to last me the rest of my days. 

Why should any of us be afraid of a little pov- 
erty? It is no killing matter. 

And I know some perfectly beautiful souls who 
never began to be great until they ceased climb- 
ing and learned to come down. 

And when they came down they did not GIVE 
UP; they rose up, faced reverses with stout 
hearts, and Misfortune, who is always a coward 
and a bully, turned tail and ran from them. 



93 



SUNSHINE 

Of all gifts of nature to man the most blessed, 
rich, and beautiful is sunshine. 

Through my window comes a broad stream 
of it; the whole chamber is filled with its spirit; 
upon the floor it lies, a patch of aerial gold. It 
is full likewise of fancies, suggestions, dream- 
seeds. 

It is that which makes flowers. The red rose 
is a drop of its blood. The Easter lily is its 
smile. The heliotrope is the sweetness of its 
breath. The violet, a hidden whisper of blue 
under a green leaf, is its girlish modesty. 

Trees are its fountain-play. All vines, bushes, 
jungles, and leaf-tangles are veils of it, bridal veils 
of earth wedded to sky. 

It is power. By it the ocean mounts to heaven 
and becomes cloud, whence descend rains. It is 
the dynamic of waterfalls, running rivers, tides, 
and all water forces. 

It congealed into coal ages ago; and from coal 
come now the energies of this era of steam. Ex 
press trains, ocean liners, factories, automobiles, 
trolley cars, all expressions of energy lie in my 

94 



shaft of sunshine. Without it they would not ex- 
ist. 

It is the lover and husband of the earth. So 
comes the blushing spring with innumerable 
charms, and the fecund summer, and the health 
and fulness of men. 

It kisses the grapes and they swell with purple 
beauty, the apples and they lusciously redden, the 
orange and the pomegranate till they hang like 
glowing festal lamps among the foliage. 

When it lies on broad seas they smile and send 
their lustre to other planets ; when it lies upon the 
land it breaks forth in green fire. 

No less is its message to the hearts of men. 
Its brilliancy and warmth are transmuted into 
spiritual cheer and the energy of creative will. 

All the mystic recesses of the soul respond to 
it. Fears flee, as bats from light-flooded caves. 
Apprehensions, morbidities, premonitions, and all 
leaden glooms melt from the inner sky, the mind 
becomes a daisied meadow, with larks singing. 

It calls women and men and little children out 
from their closed houses Into the open. They 
laugh at play and sing at labor. They become 
beautiful one to the other. They love and em- 
brace. 

The sunshine Is love-liquor; the whole earth is 
drunk with it. 

The young lambs leap up "with all four feet at 
once.'' The colts frisk. The dogs bark and 

95 



scamper. The trees become orchestral stalls of 
singing birds. 

Sunlight I the symbol of all things desirable, of 
freedom, of winged thoughts, of passion, of life 
itself! Let it fill my famished eyes, my brain, 
my soul! Let my flesh feel it, my bones warm 
with it, my blood leap beneath it, my soul drink 
faith from it! 

So long as the sun shines we must all believe in 
the Eternal Goodness. 



96 



EASTER AND THE DEAD ONES 

The dead are not those who lie in the grave- 
yard. 

We call them dead, but we do not understand 
anything about their present condition. For all 
we know, they may be more alive now than ever. 
They may have just entered into life. 

The real dead ones are walking all around us. 
They meet us in the family, in social gatherings, 
in business; the streets are full of them. 

They laugh and talk, they eat and drink, they 
gesticulate; but it is all an illusion; they are dead. 

Death Is a relative term. A man is dead more 
or less, to the degree to which his nature has 
ceased to function. 

One man is dead to love. The fires of lust 
have consumed his power to have genuine loyal 
affection. He has killed his love-power. He is 
a grinning corpse. He is a beast; the man In him 
is ashes. 

Another is dead to beauty. The sunshine 
sings to him in vain. The exquisite charm of 
light and shade, of form and color, that plays 
around us all constantly like a full orchestra, does 

97 



not exist for him. The world to him is a peni- 
tential cell. 

Another is dead to humanity. The subtle ap- 
peal of all things human does not find him. 
''Man delights him not, nor woman neither." He 
is absorbed in the service of the wooden gods of 
business, of physical gratification, of ambition; or 
he is drugged with the nepenthe of continuous 
amusement. 

This woman, bedizened for her social activities, 
seems alive, but she goes her empty round as a 
squirrel in its revolving cage. She is deeply 
weary. Her lips are dry. Her heart is bitter. 
Death has marked her. 

Life is measured by our ability to respond to 
our environment. 

We are alive according to our power to eat the 
world and men and events as they come to us, to 
assimilate them, and to gather strength and joy 
from them. 

We are dead when they eat us, when they devi- 
talize and corrode us, when they continually take 
something out of us. 

And what do you get from the Infinite? Only 
fear, a shudder, horror? Do you dodge daily 
that into which eventually your life must slip? 

Or do you daily take deep draughts of the In- 
finite? Is it a hidden spring at which you drink, 
a secret food that feeds life? 

Let us live! *'Let the dead bury their deadl" 

98 



The real test of life is the amount of radiant 
energy you possess. "These failure-people," 
says Dr. Julia Seton, ''are depressed below the 
level of universal life, like the Dead Sea; yet all 
the while within their own being are lying dor- 
mant the possibilities of the life-more-abundant 
and the success that comes from this life." 

It is Easter time. The grasses are upspring- 
ing. The birds return. The annual miracle is 
here. New life is entering into all things. Is it 
entering into you? 



99 



IS GOD GOOD? 

*'Dear Sir — I would like to ask you which has 
greater love for mankind : the father and mother 
who brought us into this world, and who deny 
themselves even the most absolute necessities in 
order that we may have the best they can give us, 
even depriving themselves of the very last mor- 
sel of bread rather than that their loved ones 
should suffer the pangs of hunger and thirst; or 
the HEAVENLY FATHER who, from the boundless 
supplies which we are taught are His to command, 
in millions of cases of dire necessity and starva- 
tion is known to have withheld His divine power 
to assuage the sufferings of those children, men 
and women, whom He claims to love so much 
more than we poor, sinful mortals can love?" 

This letter I lately received. It is a very real 
problem that is presented, shared by numberless 
mortals. It is also a very old one; Archbishop 
Whately called the presence of evil and pain in 
the world *'the problem of the ages." 

The gist of the question is: How can a good 
God allow human suffering? How can He per- 
mit such monstrous cruelties as the present war? 

The answer of every clear mind to this is, "I 

lOO 



don't know." That there Is a kindly disposed 
Ruler of the universe Is not a matter of knowl- 
edge, but of belief. It Is not knowable, but it 
is believable. 

There are many phases of life which would 
lead us to believe that the Creator Is unjust or In- 
different, My correspondent has his mind upon 
one of these phases. All disease, agony, disap- 
pointment, and death seem to argue a World 
Ruler who Is not wholly kind. 

But on the other hand there Is evidence to out- 
weigh this. The whole range of life Is set to 
joy. The keeping of Nature's laws Is attended by 
pleasure. The progress of evolution Is toward 
less misery and more justice and joy among men. 
All who can take the larger view of things be- 
lieve that the great Disposer of Destiny is good 
and benevolent. Every great poet sings this. 

We are then forced to conclude that If God Is 
good, and If evil and suffering are yet existent, 
then somehow, what we call evil must be In real- 
ity a part of the general scheme of good. While 
our moral instincts will not permit us to call evil 
good, yet we are driven to believe that the good 
Rulej has In His mind some plan wherein so- 
called evil has a place ; very much as Is Intimated 
by the Bible saying, "He maketh the wrath of 
man to praise Him"; or by Tennyson's verse: 

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill." 

lOI 



In brief, we are compelled by the balance of 
evidence to believe (i) that there is a God, (2) 
that He is good, and (3) that what we call evil 
is not comprehensible now to us, and only seems 
cruel on account of our limited intelligence. 

If we understood all that God does. He would 
not be God. 

Belief that, in spite of all, God is good, gives 
us courage, hope, cheer, and poise ; it develops the 
higher side of our life. Hence large natures 
have faith. 

Belief that there is no God, or that He is in- 
different to human suffering, or banishing the idea 
of God as far as possible out of our thought, in- 
variably stifles our better nature, and we tend to 
grow gross and materialistic, to exaggerate the 
sensual pleasures, to doubt the binding nature of 
moral convictions, and altogether to coarsen our- 
selves and cheapen life. Hence skepticism makes 
us small. 

To believe that God is unjust or tyrannical 
makes men bitter, reckless, and unhappy. 

A sane, well-balanced man, therefore, will seek 
to believe in a good God, and, although confused 
by the existence of sorrow and wrong, will sus- 
pend his judgment on this, knowing that his vision 
is imperfect, thus obeying the hint of Jesus: 

"What I do thou knowest not now; but thou 
shalt know hereafter." 

102 



"INVICTUS" 

"Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 

For my unconquerable soul. 

"In the fell clutch of circumstance 

I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 

My head is bloody but unbowed. 

"Beyond the place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the horror of the shade. 

And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

"It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishment the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul." 

One of the greatest poems In any language is 
this by William Ernest Henley. 

There are differing standards of greatness. 
Some judge a poem by its sound, Its euphonious 
vowels, the perfection of Its rhythm and rhyme, 
its Hit, Its peculiar fascination for the ear; some 

103 



by Its originality, some by its quaintness, its un- 
usual form ; some by its fidelity to classic models, 
and so on. 

I give first rank to Henley's poem because, first, 
of the Importance of its message. It is a trumpet 
call to the life forces of us; it arouses the soul's 
reserves. It appeals to the very manliest thing 
In man, that thing in him which Carlyle terms 
"The Everlasting No." 

After all, any piece of literature stands or falls 
by Its thought contents, by its inspirational power. 
David's verse, for instance, "The Lord is My 
Shepherd," Is greater than all or any of the In- 
genious rhymes of Swinburne or the sounding 
Alexandrines of Corneille, because the images 
called up by it are more majestic and awaken the 
mind to see more amazing and more affecting 
visions. 

The choice of words, the literary workmanship 
of "Invictus," however. Is faultless. 

There are happy phrases of the unforgettable 
kind. "Whatever gods there be" Is a challenge 
to all the unknown powers. "My unconquerable 
soul'* epitomizes the whole right feeling of self- 
confidence. "My head is bloody but unbowed" 
Is a sharply drawn picture of the undaunted self. 
"The menace of the years" visualizes the whole 
terror of apprehension, of presentiment. And 
the last two lines are pure gold. 

I wish that every discouraged struggler in the 

104 



battle for existence might learn these verses by- 
heart; that you, tired and hungry, as you sit on 
your bedside to-night in your mean hall bedroom, 
might say them over before you go to sleep. 

I would that every tempted woman might re- 
peat these words every day as she looks at herself 
in the mirror. 

I would that every man and woman who is face 
to face with the gaunt wolf of poverty might 
speak to the beast in these brave words. 

I would that every soul in despair who feels 
the clouds of failure settling down upon him 
would utter these mighty syllables as an incanta- 
tion to disperse the gloom and bring the sun back. 

If I could write these verses on the walls of 
every mind that contemplates suicide I would do 
more good than if I gave the gold of a benevo- 
lent Croesus. 

If I could breathe this poem into the hearts of 
all those who contemplate the desperation of 
crime I would be the greatest of all benefactors. 

Would that I had a Gabriers horn, whose tones 
would reach the whole army of the defeated, the 
sad, the morbid, the wretched and afraid! I 
would summon them again to the firing line of ef- 
fort, to the heroic attack of life upon the dreaded 
forces of surrender and death. 

Learn this poem. Store it In your heart. Say 
It to yourself. And It will mean more to you 
than all the money in all the banks of the world. 

105 



SHADOWS 

Shadows are made by light. Only when the 
sun shines in the field, only when the lamp is lit 
In the house, do the shadows appear. 

Be comforted, then. You would not have 
those strong glooms if there were no bright joy- 
sun somewhere. You never feel sin until the idea 
of righteousness rises In you. You would not 
be cursed with fear had you no courage, for fear 
Is the shadow of courage, as guilt Is the shadow 
of integrity. 

Far from proving the absence of light, the 
shadow proves within you a bright self-esteem. 

Though shadow Is cast by substance, yet we 
learn of substance by shadow. This is Plato^s 
conceit, who said that human beings are as men 
In a cave, with their backs to the light, who ob- 
tain all their knowledge of reality from the shad- 
ows falling on the wall before them. 

So on the soul's surface float the reflections of 
the universe, as trees and clouds are mirrored on 
the lake. The only way I know there exist such 
things as sun and house and book and you is that 

io6 



over my spirit pass your images. I am a watcher 
by the pool; the pool is my own soul. I am a 
crystal-gazer; my own soul is the crystal. 

What we call our opinions are but shadows of 
things. And a fact falls long and slantwise on 
me because my sun is westerly, and short and 
dark upon you for yours is noonday. 

Why should we quarrel and argue about dif- 
ferences of conviction? Let us move until we 
stand in the same relative position toward the 
light; then only shall we agree. 

The thing stands still; the shadow moves. If 
I stand erect all day in the street my shadow will 
circle around me, contra-dancing to the sun. 
Thus do opinions change. My views at twenty 
are strangely unlike my views at forty. I have 
not changed; the facts have not changed; our re- 
lation has changed. 

A student asked a professor what a sine is. 
The professor answered that a sine isn't any- 
thing at all; it is a relation between things. So 
is our knowledge. 

The spirit of man is a candle of the Lord, said 
the prophet. Hope is the undimmed gleam for- 
ward of this candle. Despair means that some 
curtain of doubt has been let down before it. 

Death is the photo-screen at the end of this 
earthly life! What moving pictures the souFs 
candle casts upon it! What are yours? Dark- 
ness, clouds, confusion? Or life more abundant, 

107 



the knitting up of severed friendships, beauty, and 
power in continuance? 

I sent my soul throughout the invisible 
Some secret of that after life to spell, 

And by and by my soul returned to me 
And whispered I myself am heaven and hell. 



io8 



WHY IS MARRIAGE A BORE? 

That marriage is too often a bore there can 
be little doubt. Many a couple simply endure 
each other's society because they are afraid to 
separate, afraid of social disgrace or afraid from 
economic reasons. Many live in constant fric- 
tion or in subdued misunderstanding. Many al- 
ternate between uxoriousness and contention. 

The reason is not far to seek. What makes 
marriage, in the first place? Illusion! And it 
IS illusion that is indispensable to its happy con- 
tinuance. 

We go about to find other causes for our dis- 
agreement. He neglects her, she nags him, he is 
stingy, she is extravagant, and all that. It is all 
aside from the main trouble, which is that inti- 
macy has been allowed to tear aside all the veils ; 
all the mystery and poetry and enchantment has 
been profanely butchered, and we call the deso- 
lation "common sense." 

The Catholic teaching that marriage is a sac- 
rament is right, in its deeper significance. The 
union of man and woman is only redeemed from 
being beastly by the element of loyalty and devo- 

109 



tlon. It Is when the sense of *'till death do us 
part" Is In both hearts that there Is any true mar- 
riage. In other words, It Is *'true love" and not 
"love" that men and women seek. 

Now, It Is essential to any divine thing that It 
be full of mystery. When you know It all, when 
there Is no more wonder and a feeling of the In- 
finite and unknown In It, then comes disgust. 
That Is why It Is a sin to worship an Idol of wood 
or stone; there Is no vagueness In It; It Is vul- 
garly knowable. 

Hence It Is that the woman who persists in 
"telling the truth" to her husband about himself, 
who picks out his flaws and exhibits them, who 
magnifies his limitations, and altogether ruth- 
lessly exposes his shortcomings, Is murdering love. 
And the man who ceases the pardonable flattery 
and praise he bestowed upon the woman In the 
days of courtship, and boasts of telling her only 
"the truth," Is sowing the seed of boredom and 
alienation. 

Only persistent seeking for the good In your 
wife or husband, continual mentioning of it, and 
repression of all personal criticism, can save a 
marriage. Human nature wants an atmosphere 
of appreciation, of praise, of love and devotion. 
If you do not care to take a life contract to sup- 
ply that, don't get married. 

Many a woman has committed suicide as to her 
love and happiness by her fatal cleverness or 

no 



murderous conscientiousness. Many a man has 
taken pride in driving all the fairies and dreams 
and sentiment from his hearthstone, and found 
himself in a hell of boredom. 

"When there is no vision the people perish. '* 
When there is no love in marriage there is loath- 
ing. 

Love is a tender plant. As well expect a rose- 
bush to grow and bloom without sun and soil and 
water as to expect love to flourish without ap- 
preciation and praise, and without careful refusal 
to deal in those ''truths" which are but ashes and 
a scorching wind to love. 



Ill 



THE MONEY MYTH 

If there is any one truth among the vital 
truths of life that hide themselves as gravitation 
and steam and the other natural forces so long 
hid themselves, and one truth that needs to be 
brought to light for the help and guidance of 
men, it is that the ultimate treasure in any man's 
possession is his personal character, and that the 
net result of any man's final effect upon the world 
is measured solely by the influence of his person- 
ality. 

Beside the net result upon the world of what 
a man is, what a man has is of small impor- 
tance. The whole gospel of the power of wealth, 
and of the ability of a person to push mankind 
up or down, to save or to ruin, by means of money 
and the power of money, is fallacious. 

Money can do many things; it has its peculiar 
dynamic; but in the making of the world better, 
in the increase of conscience power, of ethical 
energy, it counts not at all. 

Your first impulse will be to deny this, to de- 
clare it a crazy creed. For you live in an age 
that deifies money. All the human creatures 

112 



around you are working for it. The great ones 
of earth seem to be those who have heaps of it 
And every church, college, and eleemosynary in- 
stitution is on its knees before it. 

It is natural that you should think that if you 
had a billion dollars you could do an incalculable 
amount of good. But you are mistaken. The 
sum total of your good-doing capacity lies in your 
naked soul. 

In fact, if you are going into the "uplift'* busi- 
ness the nearer you come to having nothing at all 
the surer is the probability of your success. 

Read your history. The three greatest figures 
of spiritual potency in Christian records are 
Jesus, Saint Paul, and Saint Francis of Assisi. 
They had to go into poverty to get power. So 
did Buddha. Compare these with the wealth- 
holders, from Midas and Croesus, the Medici and 
the Fuggers, down to the Rothschilds and the 
American plutocrats. 

The hurt of the world cannot be poulticed by 
money. The progress of mankind cannot be 
aided by money. 

Truth cannot be advanced nor hindered by 
money. It moves in the hearts of the people, and 
the only power that can aid or impede it is Man- 
Power. 

Your notion that you "could do so much good 
if only you had money'' is an error. All the 
good you can possibly do lies in you, in your spirit. 

"3 



You could produce some happiness or misery by 
money; you might relieve conditions here and 
there; but no real good was ever done people that 
they did not do for themselves, and the only way 
to "do good" is to induce the people, and to show 
them the way, to do it for themselves. 

Feudalism, paternalism, and the like are as 
specious in morals as in politics. Democracy is 
more terribly true in the moral realm than in the 
political. 

You may produce a temporary flush of welfare, 
of moral force, and of good by the money pill; 
but the reaction is always sad. 

If you would be "great," and if you seek the 
heights of moral leadership, you must obey the 
suggestion of the greatest Teacher that ever 
lived; and I assure you His words are just as true 
in America as in Galilee, in the twentieth century 
as in the first. 

"Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in 
your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither 
two coats, nor shoes, nor yet staves." 

It is the men who obeyed this that transformed 
the world. It is the institutions that thought they 
were wiser and shrewder than this that have 
clogged the world. 



114 



PEGS AND HOLES 

There is no single thing so much needed to in- 
sure the happiness of mankind, also its efficiency 
and progress, as some scheme to get every hu- 
man being in the environment best suited to his 
needs. 

There are too many square pegs in round holes, 
and round pegs in square holes. Hence so many 
botched tasks and fretful souls and such wide- 
spread irksomeness. 

Let us not be ungrateful to Mr. Carnegie for 
his libraries and peace foundations, to Mr. 
Rockefeller for his university, to Mr. Gescheidt 
for his endowed bread line, and to all and sundry 
persons who living or dying devote large sums to 
schools, hospitals, museums, churches, and chari- 
ties. As the manager out west appeared upon 
the stage and requested the audience to refrain 
from shooting at the pianist, as he was doing the 
best he could, so it behooves us not to throw 
things at the philanthropists unless we are pre- 
pared to do a better job. 

But, as we walk up and down the ways of men, 
we can but wonder why somebody does not go at 

115 



the real thing that alls the world ; which he might 
do by securing for each individual the work in 
life he can do best. 

The average parent, prompted by pardonable 
solicitude, earnestly tries to impose his own no- 
tions upon the young. Instead of studying the 
child to see what the Creator intended him to do, 
he makes the child study him. 

The average school has a ready-made curricu- 
lum, a mould into which the young mind is forced. 

Absolutely the most valuable element in the 
child is his individuality. If he ever is to excel 
it will be by developing that. Yet It seems to be 
the custom of the guardians of youth to call his 
Idiosyncrasy sin, obstinacy, and other hard names, 
and to call his willingness to give up his inborn 
bent, goodness. 

How many a born farmer is keeping books in 
a bank, how many a born musician is looking 
after the house or running a grocery, how many 
a born philosopher, or writer, or dramatist Is 
grinding away at making money, and how many 
a born business man is preaching or teaching or 
trying to write I 

There are plasterers that ought to be tailors, 
and plumbers that ought to be gardeners, and 
bankers that ought to be stone-masons. And 
how rarely does the born statesman get Into the 
Senate ! 

The world Is not lazy. No man is lazy when 

ii6 



he finds his decreed work. He would rather do 
that than eat. The trouble is that we are mis- 
fits. 

Don't ask me how we are going to remedy it. 
I don't know. 

But I have an idea that in time we are going to 
work out a better system than the present one. 
Some day we shall brush away privilege, and the 
wage system, and artificial distinctions, and preju- 
dices, and hand-me-down schools and colleges, and 
consult only justice, reason and common sense; 
and then maybe we shall come nearer getting 
square pegs into square holes and round pegs into 
round holes. Perhaps. 



117 



THE DIVINE RIGHT OF PROPERTY 

Just where the fiction arose and fastened itself 
upon the human race, that a man has a right to 
control his property even after he is dead, history 
does not state. 

Doubtless the idea antedates history. Man- 
kind seems to have started out with a large equip- 
ment of "divine rights," which it has clung to like 
a pup to an overshoe, and has let go of only when 
half choked to death. 

There was the divine right of kings over sub- 
jects, of the nobility and aristocracy of one kind 
or another over the common run, of ecclesiastics 
over the laity, of men over women, of masters 
over slaves, of people of one color over people of 
another color, and, last and bulldoggedest, the 
divine right of property. 

The last named right carries with it the priv- 
ilege of controlling what was yours when you are 
at rest in your mausoleum and when the goods 
and chattels are in the hands of some one else. 

It used to be a deal worse than now. It has 
eased up a lot, under the merciless corrosion of 

ii8i 



Intelligence, in place of superstition, applied to 
human affairs. 

The right of entail, whereby a man dictated the 
disposition of his lands and titles forever, has 
been clipped, and now It Is pretty generally the 
rule that the dead man's hand can only keep its 
hold for about twenty-one years or so. 

It Is still true, however, that a wealthy harness- 
maker or note-shaver can endow a school for 
teaching the most outlandish piffle and the courts 
will uphold him. Vast sums are constantly being 
settled upon institutions for the obstruction of 
human progress. We are still ruled largely from 
the grave. 

If a man leaves no will his property goes to his 
heirs. And to a man from Mars the right of 
an heir is one of the most amusing freaks of the 
thing called law. 

For Instance, a vaudeville artist named Harry 
Fragson was killed the other day by his father 
in a fit of jealous anger. The lawyers seriously 
debated whether the son's money (and he was 
rich) did not go by inheritance to the father who 
murdered him. 

But the wildest vagaries of common sense could 
hardly exceed the picturesque tomfoolery of the 
divine right scheme. For example, a man in 
Paris by the name of BIoux died recently and left 
a will. His body was to be burled In a strange 
tomb he had built, ornamented by pictures of 

119 



saints, hunting dogs and shotguns, as his ruling 
passions had been piety and hunting. 

The coffin was to be placed upon a revolving 
disc, with a crank on the outside with which to 
turn it. His heirs were to go and work the crank 
and turn the disc every so often, on penalty of 
losing the inheritance. Bioux did not want to 
be forever motionless. At stated times, there- 
fore, his heirs work the crank-handle, to the great 
diversion of the bystanders. 

Mr. Gescheidt endowed a bread-line. 

Hicks left his money to a college where mathe- 
matics could be taught only by Baptists. 



120 



GET OFF THE KITTEN'S TAIL 

Who originated the story I do not know. It 
comes to me from Dr. Percy S. Grant, rector of 
the Church of the Ascension, in New York, as 
reported in the Outlook, But it is a good one. 

A tender-hearted lady rushed to stroke and pat 
a stray kitten which had sought refuge in the 
house from the merciless street. But the more 
she petted the more the kitty writhed, meowed 
and spat. The lady could not understand the un- 
gratefulness of the animal, until a bystander 
pointed out to her that while she was caressing 
the kitten's head she was all the while standing 
on Its tail. 

Haec fabula docet lots. 

It shows why the Intelligent poor fail to throw 
their hats into the air in enthusiasm for the chari- 
ties and philanthropies that have been handed 
them, in the name of the Lord and of the corpora- 
tion, so long as they are smarting under the con- 
viction that they are being robbed of just wages 
and fundamental rights. 

It shows why wives often fail in gratitude to 
their liege lords for food, clothes, jewels, and 

121 



housing, while from them are withheld the weight- 
ier matters of love and a decent respect for their 
personality and opinions. 

It shows why children are ungrateful to par- 
ents who shower gifts and luxuries upon them, 
but never give them a chance to do as they please 
a bit. 

It shows why the church somehow fails to be 
duly thanked for its zeal to "save" men, because 
of its zeal in restricting and dominating men. 

It shows how the governing classes of the old 
world, the nobles and kings, find the populace and 
its parliaments continually rebellious and com- 
plaining. ''Have we not done wonderful chari- 
ties and given great largess?" say the privileged 
ones. But they do not notice where their foot is. 

Some day we are going to find out that what 
the world of common men want is not kindness, 
charity, philanthropy, and the like ; they first want 
JUSTICE, A SQUARE DEAL, and THE ABOLITION 
OF UNEARNED PRIVILEGE. 

They do not want so much to be patted on the 
head; they want you to take your foot off their 
tail. 



122 



ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD WOMAN 

She is dead. As in the case of all whom we 
knew to be intensely alive, we cannot make it 
real. Nothing can convince us, in our inner con- 
sciousness, that she is not by, and may not any 
moment come in upon us. 

I shall set down no facts of her life. In the 
presence of the great eternities of her character 
and of her life now in the heavens, the common- 
place items of the date and place of her birth and 
the incidents of her career seem to fade and make 
no matter. 

Rather let us recall those traits of soul whereby 
she appealed to us, and revealed to us the rich- 
ness of our common humanity. 

First of all, she was brave. This was the key 
to her life. 

All the old enemies of soul met her and had 
their way with her. She met them as a good sol- 
dier. Not that she was hard and stoical, nor did 
she take the usual refuge of small natures in bit- 
ter cynicism. She suffered keenly. When she 
was smitten she was in exquisite pain. 

But the pain to her was a call to arms. She 

123 



rallied. She had many resources. She was cast 
down, but never defeated. 

Because she was, in the centre of her life, 
brave-souled, she was cheerful. She carried high 
every day the flag of hope and courage; all about 
her took heart to see her. 

She was gay and debonair as the last warrior 
on the battlefield. 

She wrung out her heart in silent agony, in ter- 
rible asides, and came back to us smiling and un- 
afraid again. 

She was good. Not in any unreal or artificial 
piety, but good in the deep strength of the funda- 
mental virtues that make women great. 

Her goodness lay in the strength of her hu- 
manities. Her love was strong, even violent, but 
beautiful because it was loyal. 

Her purity was not circumstantial; it was in- 
stinctive. 

Her kindness was sweetly unreasonable. There 
was no method in it; it simply pushed her to con- 
tinuous thoughtfulness and helpfulness. What- 
ever or whoever was weak or unfortunate, or 
treated unjustly, was a challenge to her, which 
she took up instantly. 

Her heart was very great and wide. Who- 
ever lodged there never was cast out. She was 
almost stubborn and over-brave in her loyalties. 

The deep sanctities of her nature were not the 
kind that led to pedestals and isolation ; they were 

124 



the kind to live with. They who saw her daily, 
and to whom she uncovered her secret thoughts 
and wants, were they who loved her most. 

I can say no better thing of any person than 
what I can say of her, that she was the sort of 
human being you would turn to in any trouble, 
whether you were sinner or sinned against, and 
be sure of welcome and defense in her. 

She loved life, loved pretty things, loved genu- 
ine and honest people, loved fine action, loved 
all that gives color and richness to life. Her 
soul was in no sense anaemic. It was red- 
blooded. 

We cannot think her dead. All that great cur- 
rent of human feeling and purpose must live on 
— somewhere. She has added, by her passing, 
to the reality of that unknown home whither she 
has gone, and whither we are moving surely. 

The only real proof of immortality is love, for 
love alone grasps the majesty and essential in- 
destructibility of human life. Another reason 
for believing in a heaven, where the crooked 
things of life are made straight, and where the 
injustice of life is smoothed into perfect equity, is 
that she has gone there. 

She is dead. We love her still and will al- 
ways. Hence she lives and awaits us. This is 
the argument of the heart, many times more con- 
vincing than any reasoning of the brain. 

She is gone; gone like a sweet ship that we 

125 



watch through tear-misty eyes as it sails out into 
the vast sea. 

But what freight of hope and faith she carries ! 
We stand upon the pier and wave her good-by, 
and shout till she can hear no more : 

"Good-by! We will see you soonl" 



126 



PROFESSIONALISM 

When the policeman raises his hand at the 
street crossing, teams stop, automobiles put on 
the brakes, pedestrians stand still; for it is not the 
man, but the blue coat that carries authority. 

The conductor on the train and the captain on 
the ship speak and are obeyed, because behind 
them are the company and the law. 

When the parson performs the marriage cere- 
mony, it is the church that is behind his words and 
gives them impressiveness. 

When the teacher gives a command, it is the 
state that issues its orders to the little boy. 

Back of the physician, when he looks wise and 
says "Here, take this and lie still!" is the impos- 
ing medical profession. 

Everybody loves to command and to be obeyed. 
Something in us all is tickled by "a little brief au- 
thority." 

That is the reason there is so much profession- 
alism in the world. 

That is why, from the martinet school teacher 
and parent to the strutting major general, and 

127 



the ponderous bishop, there is so much petty 
tyranny and sly cruelty. 

That is why there are so many people on earth 
from whom we pray the good Lord to deliver us. 

The institution is a grand thing. It carries a 
weight no man can carry. It is an exaggerated 
compound ego that crushes the individual. 

When a man lets his uniform sink into his soul 
he ceases to be a man and becomes a cog. 

The little soul swells itself up with the impor- 
tance of the institution it represents. 

The great and lovable soul strives to conceal 
the fact that it represents an institution and to 
emphasize the fact that it is human. 

So the best physician is the one who is a kind 
and helpful man; the best priest is the one that 
is the most human; the best policeman is the one 
who remembers he is first of all a man; the best 
parent is the one who covers up his authority, and 
the best teacher is the one who is a sympathetic 
friend. 

Beware of professionalism, for it is the curse 
of small natures. 

Be real, be genuine, be human. Never want 
any more respect for yourself than your own char- 
acter and person can win. 

A great portion of that pile of misery that 
burdens the people of earth is caused by imper- 
sonality, the heartlessness of officialdom, the cold- 
ness of office, the pettiness of professionalism. 

128 



*'Men/' said Rousseau, "be human! It is your 
first duty." 

In the literature announcing Fraternity Day in 
connection with the Knights of Pythias celebra- 
tion in Chicago, I find these four pregnant propo- 
sitions on the subject of "Fraternity, and What 
Can You Do With It?" 

"You can teach men to think more of their re- 
ligion than they think of their churches. 

"You can teach men to think more of their edu- 
cation than they think of their colleges. 

"You can teach men to think more of their fra- 
ternity than they think of their lodges. 

"You can teach men to think more of humanity 
than they think of their nationalities." 



129 



FACTS AND ALCOHOE 

We have done more loose talking and indulged 
in more childish reasoning about this drinking 
matter than about any other thing that is an issue 
of life and death. 

It is not a debatable question, what alcohol 
does to you. The facts and the laws that govern 
them are as absolute as the facts and laws in a 
chemical laboratory. 

Of course, old man Perkins, who just died at 
the age of ninety-nine over on Bitter Creek, used 
to drink a pint of whiskey every day. And Bill 
Simmons, the hardware man, says that his uncle. 
Judge Simmons of Kentucky, takes his nip regu- 
larly and is sound as a dollar at seventy-seven. 
And the barkeeper urges you to *'come on, have 
another, a little won't hurt you.'* And the Ger- 
mans consume floods of beer — and now look at 
them, fighting the world. And all the boys drink 
and have a good time. And then there are the 
French and Italians taking wine at their meals, 
and the husky Britishers consuming Scotch and 
Polly. 

'130 



If you prefer to risk your life on this kind of 
rumor and slop talk, you may do so. 

But you don't have to. It Is not necessary to 
take a gambler's chance. 

The people best qualified perhaps to tell you 
about how long you may be expected to live are 
the life insurance people. The Association of 
Life Insurance Presidents held their eighth an- 
nual meeting the other day. Mr. Arthur 
Hunter, of the medical department, made an ad- 
dress. 

He indulged In no arguments nor hearsay, but 
gave some facts, facts on which the com- 
panies DO MILLIONS OF DOLLARS V^ORTH OF 
BUSINESS. He gave infallible figures, based on 
the cases of 2,000,000 men and women insured 
in the past twenty-five years with forty-three lead- 
ing American life insurance companies. 

These statistics show that consistent users of 
alcoholic drinks die six years younger than they 
should. 

One-time consistent drinkers, who reformed be- 
fore they took out life Insurance policies, die four 
years younger than they should. 

These life insurance men are not prohibition- 
ists, cranks nor white-ribboners. They are hard- 
headed business men. 

Isn't It queer that In making money men go 
after the facts and are not led away by sentiment, 

131 



while In saving one's health and life we listen to 
any old granny tale we may be told. 

Hence, son, you let alcohol alone! It never 
did anybody any good as a steady beverage. 

You can find physicians who do not condemn 
it, but you cannot find a scientist who will nojt tell 
you it is plain poison. 

If you drink at all go to the facts and draw 
your own conclusions from them — and not from 
what you hear about Sam Jenkins's wife's sec- 
ond cousin. 



132 



DAY AND NIGHT 

Why not slide the day's programme back about 
five hours? 

This suggestion is based upon the superior life- 
value of the early morning hours. The world 
can do more and better work from 5 to 12 in the 
morning than from 5 In the afternoon to mid- 
night. 

Besides, daylight fun is more wholesome than 
gaslight fun. 

You cannot find anybody with whom to do busi- 
ness until 10 o'clock or so In the downtown of- 
fices, as things are to-day. Let us get down to 
work at 7 A. M., and quit for the day at noon or 
I P.M. 

Let us have theatres and concerts and parties 
in the afternoon Instead of at night. 

When dark comes let us go to bed. 

This is entirely impractical, impossible. Hence 
most to be desired. The impossible is always 
more fascinating than the possible. 

How did we come to sleep all morning and sit 
up all night? Why have we reversed Nature and 
artificialized our whole social structure? And 

133 



why is It considered common, bourgeois and un- 
distinguished to get up with the sun, and upper- 
tennish and hilarious to get up with the moon? 

Think also of economy! How many oodles of 
dollars we squander in electricity, gas, and kero- 
sene, so that we may poke around In the dark, 
when the Creator gives us for nothing an infi- 
nitely better light by day! 

What a twisted old world it is I Let's you and 
me set it right. 

But some man will say, how? 

It is the simplest thing imaginable. We will 
call a meeting. At the meeting Vv^e will draft 
resolutions. Then we will appoint a committee. 
Then we will secure the names of a number of 
prominent people as honorary vice-presidents and 
as an advisory board. Then we will take up a 
collection. 

That's all. Then we can go home and think 
how easy reform is, after all. 



134 



BEN FRANKLIN ON SUNSHINE 

I HAVE received the following letter which 
caused me so much pleasure that I pass it on to 
my readers: 

"Dear Sir — Apropos of your article *Day and 
Night,' some time ago I read an article by the 
great Franklin, king of American humorists, pres- 
ent, past, and future. The article is supposed 
to be sent In the form of a letter to the Paris 
Journal and is entitled 'An Economical Project.' 
('Elegant Extracts From the Most Eminent 
Prose Writers,' Book X., Pages i6o to i66. J. 
Sharp, Piccadilly, C. Whittlngham, Printers, 
London.) He talks of a discovery made for 
which he (Franklin) demands 'neither place, pen- 
sion, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward 
whatever. And yet I know there are little envi- 
ous minds who will, as usual, deny me this, and 
say that my invention was known by ancients, and 
perhaps bring passages out of the old books in 
proof of it. 

" 'I will not dispute with these people that the 
ancients knew not that the sun would rise at cer- 
tain hours; they possibly had, as we have, al- 



manacs that predicted it. But it does not follow 
from thence that they knew "he gave light as 
SOON AS HE ROSE." This is what I claim as my 
discovery. If the ancients knew it, it might have 
been long since forgotten, for it certainly is un- 
known to the Parisians. 

" *I say it is impossible that so sensible a peo- 
ple under such circumstances should have lived so 
long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously 
expensive light of candles if they had really 
known that they might have had as much pure 
light of the sun for nothing.' 

*'Your remedy is to call a meeting. Franklin 
had, to my point of reasoning, a more effective 
way of setting it right. In fact, he proposed the 
following regulations: 

" 'First — Let a tax be laid of a louis per win- 
dow on every window that is provided with shut- 
ters to keep out the light of the sun. 

'* 'Second — Let guards be placed in the shop of 
the wax and tallow chandlers and no family be 
permitted to be supplied with more than a pound 
of candles per week. 

. " 'Third — Let guards also be posted to stop 
all the coaches, etc., that would pass the street 
after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, 
and midwives. 

" 'Fourth — Every morning as soon as the sun 
rises let all the bells in every church be set ring- 
ing, and if that is not sufficient let cannon be fired 

136 



in every street to wake the sluggards ettectually 
and make them open their eyes to see their true 



interest/ 



"All the difficulty will be in the first two or 
three days, after which the reformation will be 
as natural and easy as the present irregularity, 
for 'ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute/ Oblige 
a man to rise at 4 in the morning and it is more 
probable he shall go willingly to bed at 8 in the 
evening. 

"I am sincerely yours, 

Peter Franzone." 



137 



LABORER AND ARTIST 

You can do work in one of two ways, as a la- 
borer or as an artist. 

To work as a laborer is hard. It dulls the 
brain, wears out the body, and embitters the soul. 

To work as an artist sharpens the mind, ex- 
hilarates the body, and refreshes the soul. 

It is well to pay the laborer good wages, to 
give him short hours, to protect him by law, and 
to encourage him by kindness; but there is some- 
thing better — ^^it is to do away with labor alto- 
gether. 

And this is to be done not by starving laborers, 
exiling them, nor killing them; but by changing 
them into artists. 

To accomplish this Is the task of civilization. 

The way to redeem labor Is to change it to 
craftsmanship. 

The laborer Is moved by wages; the craftsman 
by love for and pride In his work. 

Whatever a man has to do he can do as an ar- 
tist. The barber shaves you best who finds joy 
in performing the operation neatly and skilfully. 
The carpenter who is only trying to get his money 

138 



does slovenly work; when he pleases himself by 
making a thing useful and beautiful he pleases 
the customer. 

There are two kinds of grocers, those who 
want only your money and those whose aim is to 
keep the best possible store. 

So you can tell the difference between the 
craftsman and the laborer In any person, in the 
paperhanger, house painter, plumber, bootblack, 
architect, lawyer, preacher, servant girl or sen- 
ator. 

It is the delight in producing, in creating, in 
rendering any service to mankind by your brain 
or hands that takes the curse from labor. 

Life itself is a task. You can labor at it, break 
your heart and your back, groan and sweat and 
get the everlasting mulligrubs; or you can make 
each day's doing as beautiful, well-rounded, and 
satisfying as a statue or a picture. 

Art is not confined to paintings, porcelains, 
tapestries, and other luxuries; It applies as well 
to the necessities. A woman can make an art of 
the care of her children, of her housekeeping, of 
her dinners, of her social duties, and find a pleas- 
ure in these things such as Raphael found in draw- 
ing his Madonnas. 

Whoever has learned the secret of craftsman- 
ship has shifted the load of labor from his back. 

Whoever has caught the spirit of the artist has 
saved his life. 

139 



The progress of invention, of education, and 
of co-operation means that by and by all stupid, 
humdrum, and merely routine labor shall be done 
by machinery, and that human beings shall exert 
themselves only in craftsmanship and artistry. 
That will be the Golden Age. 



140 



THE SUCCESS FETICH 

Millions of school children are being daily 
inoculated with the false success Idea. 

False success means achievement by beating 
somebody else. 

Real success means achievement by doing the 
best you can. It implies the most perfect disci- 
pline of yourself, the highest standards for your- 
self, and doing the best work of which you are 
capable. 

It has nothing to do with excelling any one 
else. 

The minute the idea of surpassing, outdoing, 
conquering, or worsting another enters Into your 
motive, it is vitiated; you have received the seeds 
of discontent; you have laid the foundation for 
strife, envy, jealousy, and unhapplness. Your 
real success becomes Impossible. 

All games are affected with the competition 
germ. In baseball, football, prisoner's base, 
checkers, and cards the aim Is to win over an op- 
ponent. 

The little ones are doped on such mental im- 
pure food as prizes, rewards of excellence, being 

141 



head of the class, and getting on the honor roll. 
They recite "Excelsior." Their forces are di- 
rected against each other. 

While the children are practising this gospel 
in school their elders are illustrating its perfect 
work on the battlefields of Europe, straining every 
nerve to kill, maim, and ruin each other in order 
to succeed — to make their own nation outshine 
the other fellow's nation. 

The arena of business is a fierce welter of the 
same sort of gladiatorial theory. Business firms 
overshriek and undercut one another. Thou- 
sands of honest men go down every year in the 
war of capital. The triumph of big business is 
over the mangled hopes of small competitors. In 
office, shop, and store the clerks plot and plan to 
get promoted over another man. 

The old beast-law of struggle, evolution by 
fighting, the survival of the strongest, and vae 
victis obtains. 

As a matter of fact, no progress has ever been 
made by competition. All permanent advance 
of the race has been by co-operation. The tri- 
umph of mankind has been the triumph of organ- 
ization. 

Children ought to be taught that the only work 
that counts is good work for Its own sake, and 
that effort put forth to beat another worker is 
really destructive. 

Thank God ! I never beat anybody that I know 

142 



of, I never won a prize, and am ashamed that I 
tried to win on several occasions. 

If you will purge your mind of the poison of 
so-called success and concentrate upon getting for 
yourself your freest self-expression, the best work 
possible, and the joy of satisfying your own re- 
quirements, you will do much toward insuring for 
yourself happy days and sleepful nights. 

Work never hurt anybody. It is rivalry that 
kills. It is competition that strains, tires, irri- 
tates, and embitters. The heart of the honest 
worker whose pride is his work, and who neither 
fears nor envies another, is full of poise and of 
divine peace. 

We call ourselves sympathetic when we sympa- 
thize with another's sorrow and failure. The 
only true sympathy is sympathy with another's 
success. 

Let us cease the eternal fight. Let us join 
hands to bring on the success of all, without which 
the success of any one is a bit spoiled. 



143 



THE THINKER AS WEALTH MAKER 

It is a favorite theorem among debaters on 
economic questions that all wealth is produced 
from the three sources — land, labor, and capital. 

But there is a fourth element overlooked. The 
greatest of all wealth producers is mind. 

It might be classed under labor, but it is not 
exactly labor; it is not work; it is the power to 
see, to invent, to co-ordinate. A man can sit on 
his shoulder blades and smoke a cigar, and, if 
his think-works operate sufficiently, add more 
wealth to the country than ten thousand hand- 
workers. 

It is not the amount of land a man has, it is 
the amount of gumption that determines his pro- 
ductivity. 

I once asked an Illinois farmer how much land 
a man needed in order to make a good living. 
He answered: "If he*s got brains enough all he 
needs is land enough to stand on.'* 

President Vail's report of the Telephone Com- 
pany for 19 14, just received, is illustrative. Here 
is a business that has climbed from zero in 1876 
to over a billion in 19 14. The whole thing ger- 

144 



minated in an idea. It is not capital, it is not 
land, it is the vision of an inventor that is the 
cause of this amazing business structure. 

What the nation needs is not more things, it 
is more brains. 

Intelligence is creative. Ignorance is destruc- 
tive. 

The simple reason why Europe is now devas- 
tating and destroying is ignorance. They do not 
understand the art of government. They haven't 
sense enough to devise the necessary machinery 
with which international disputes may be settled 
by law. They haven't even sense enough to try. 

Sometimes we gird at the railroad for paying 
its president $50,000 a year. If he has the real 
molecules in his occiput he is cheap at twice the 
price. One ounce of understanding, acumen, and 
foresight is worth more to the road than five 
thousand strong arms — really worth it in wealth- 
producing capacity. 

J. H. Lockwood in a recently published work, 
"The Creation of Wealth,'* gives a list of the 
ways intelligence makes wealth. Among the 
items are: The initial idea, the invention, proj- 
ect, plan ; increasing the efficiency of labor by or- 
ganization; improvement in materials and ma- 
chinery; elimination of waste; advertising; secur- 
ing necessary capital; securing proper adjustment 
of the business to public opinion and to legisla- 
tion. 

14S 



But these are only phases of the great truth 
that man's spirit (mind) creates wealth, even as 
God created the world, for man is the son of 
God. 

All wealth springs from thought-seed. It was 
the steam thought in the mind of Watt that grew 
into the enormous railway, steamship, and factory 
wealth of to-day. 

Both laborer and capitalist are apt to get a lit- 
tle too chesty at times. 

The thinker is worth the two of them. 



146 



SOME FACTS ABOUT SEX 

There are some facts every boy ought to 
know about sex matters. Of course, the subject 
is as inflammable as gasoline and has to be han- 
dled with greatest care. But the worst element 
in it is ignorance. Most vice begins with lack 

OF KNOWLEDGE. 

Suffer, therefore, a few plain, honest remarks. 

With the entrance into manhood comes the 
functioning of sex and the natural desires at- 
tendant. These cravings are not wicked; they 
are normal; they are just as healthful as the de- 
sire for food. 

First, therefore, don't get into a fever of con- 
science about them. The most dangerous phase 
of sex is MORBIDITY, self-accusation, self-pity, or 
feeling that you are low and wicked. It's all a 
part of the development of life ; and if you know 
the truth and learn how to discipline and manage 
yourself you need have no tragedy. 

The first truth you must believe is this, that 
sexual gratification is NOT necessary to 
health. Any physician will ratify this. A man 

147 



can live a perfectly sound and efficient life and 
leave out sex matters entirely. 

What a world of misery would be avoided if 
men only knew this fact ! And what a mass of 
unhealthy, snivelling self-pity and plain vicious- 
ness we should be saved! 

Sex desires do not originate in the body, but in 
the MIND. It is because the minds of men and 
women are constantly vitiated that these desires 
become so imperative. Novels dwell upon sex 
matters, magazine stories exploit them, the the- 
atre exhibits them, they are treated in art, con- 
versation runs to them ; In fact, society In all ways 
seeks to overstimulate this one phase of personal 
expression. That Is the reason why there Is a 
perpetual outbreak of abnormalities. 

Watch your thoughts and you will have little 
trouble with your body ; that is, provided you be- 
gin early enough in life. 

The only thing that can save a man In the best 
possible way from the sex slough is true, loyal 
love for one woman. Monogamy Is the only 
tried and perfect solution. Of course, It has Its 
Imperfections, but on the whole, and In the long 
run. It Is the only satisfactory answer to the prob- 
lem the human race has yet discovered. 

And that Is because sex can only be brought 
Into harmony, balanced, and duly co-ordinated 
with the rest of life's forth-puttlngs by being 
IDEALIZED, by being linked to the beautifying, 

148 



spiritualizing functions of loyalty, devotion, and 
self-sacrifice that marriage, and marriage alone, 
carries with it. 

Sex is a powerful force, the most tremendous 
passion in human nature. It is intended to be. 
It is Nature's provision for the perpetuity of the 
race. 

But every force in us is a danger unless it is 
subjected to discipline. Fire in the hearth is 
a comfort; fire uncontrolled is a conflagration. 
Steam confined in a locomotive is useful; when it 
bursts its confines it is destructive. 

So your desires; if you begin early enough, and 
if you learn how to govern them and how to give 
them vent only in such ways as shall not damage 
your life, they will pass into an invigoration of 
both your body and your mind. 

Think these things out, boy. Get at the 
FACTS. Don't botch your life by believing a lot 
of hearsay and vicious rumors. Find out the 
truth. 

Only the truth can make you free. 



149 



THE INEFFICIENT 

I AM talking to you, son. You're a healthy 
young fellow of twenty. You are strong in body 
and your mind is not weak. And I say to you 
that if you are broke, stranded, and friendless, 
it's ten to one that but one person will be to 
blame, and that's yourself. 

For you can make yourself efficient. There is 
some one thing, maybe two things, that you can 
be able to do better than most other people can 
do. And for a person who can make good there 
is always an opening. 

This world is full of second raters, of un- 
skilled, untrained, botching, butter-fingered in- 
competents. They usually are so because they 
were too lazy or too ignorant to prepare them- 
selves to do well some part of the world's work. 

Lord, Lord! the poor work that fills the world! 
Think of it! Of all the mothers in this town, 
how many are successes? How many are ap- 
plying themselves, by study and constant effort, to 
the business of mothering? 

I had, I suppose, a hundred teachers, more or 
less, in my school days; and of them I can't re- 

150 



member over two or three that understood how 
to teach. The others were just holding their 
jobs. 

Most preachers you hear are bad — not bad 
men, but bad preachers. Most singers cannot 
sing. Most actors are mediocre. Most books 
are a waste of time. Most houses are not fit to 
live in. Most cooks can't cook. Most clerks 
do not earn even the small salary they get. 

I do not speak of genius, nor of the excep- 
tionally gifted people. It is a plain fact that 

THE MAN WHO SIMPLY DOES WELL THE THING 
HE IS PAID FOR DOING IS A RARE QUANTITY. 

That is the shameful truth. 

And the direct road toward always getting em- 
ployment, toward being indispensable and in de- 
mand, is to EQUIP YOURSELF TO DO SOMETHING 
WELL. 

Efficiency? Why, I don't know a solitary 
hotel or restaurant in this town where you can 
get a slice of bread that is real bread like mother 
used to make. And as for hot biscuit — they 
haven't the remotest idea of them. You can get 
forty-seven kinds of meats and vegetables with 
all sorts of sauces, all tasting about alike, but 
never a piece of homemade bread. And the case 
is almost as bad with coffee. 

When you hire a carpenter, painter, paper- 
hanger, upholsterer, plasterer, or plumber to do 
a job in your house it is reasonably sure that his 

ICI 



work will be slighted, bungled, and unsatisfac- 
tory, unless you stand over him with a club. 
What a field is open to the man who docs good 
work, who is punctual, honest, and capable! 

No, son, don't get led astray by wild-eyed the- 
ories. To be sure, it's a wicked, cruel, and self- 
ish world. There's a deal of injustice and spe- 
cial privilege and all that in it. 

But I'm talking to YOU. And I tell you that 
the way to keep out of the mud of failure is to 
train yourself, to study, to be industrious, and to 
^t yourself to do something well, to make good. 

They tell you that every employer has more 
applicants than he has jobs. The truth is that 
he has more inefficient applicants. If he 
KNEW that you could do the business satisfactorily 
he would give you work immediately. 

The world is hungry for men who can and do 
MAKE GOOD. 



I5» 



CONDENSED PRESENCE 

"To the faithful," said Emily Dickinson (and 
do you know that most delicious of American 
poets?), "To the faithful, absence is condensed 
presence. To the others — but there are no oth- 
ers. 

Have you never felt that? There is that one 
who is around the house every day. You have 
become so used to her that she is almost sister 
to pots and kettles. She has settled into where 
she is taken for granted — appalling fate! Then 
one day she goes away and stays a week. It 
seems simple when she proposed it. Things 
would run along all right. 

Then when you came home, the first day of 
her absence, what a vast, resounding hollowness 
in the house ! There was restraint at the break- 
fast table, a ghost seemed about. The place that 
knew her — it was not empty of her, it was 
crowded with her. She was in the halls, in the 
living room, everywhere, from attic to cellar. 
The piano mutely shrieked of her. She was hid- 
den in every closet. 

Sleep was spoiled. You turned over and back 

153 



again. Bothering thoughts trampled into your 
mind. Memories rose upon your shut eyes, like 
suns. Where was she now? What was she do- 
ing? 

She was absent from you, yet she was never so 
present. The accursed darkness of the room was 
full of her. She saturated the atmosphere. All 
through your fitful cat-naps her voice was calling 
you. 

Why, you didn't realize the hair of her head 
smelled so, as if her soul lay in it. 

Once you made her weep — ^to think of it now! 

How she served you, anticipated you, lived for 
you, thought for you. How loyal to you was 
every bone in her body. And you took it as a 
matter of course ! Oh, if only some thick-legged 
friend would come and kick you ! 

In the morning the children act so queerly. It 
is as if some one were dying in the house. At 
the table there are long silences. When the lit- 
tle boy asks when mamma is coming home you 
try to answer him gently, but inwardly you are 
raging. Why does he mention it? 

She follows you down town to your work, as 
she never did before. She thrusts her face in 
between you and the newspaper. Your work 
goes badly for her pestering. You go to lunch 
with the boys and swear there never was so stu- 
pid a lot. You attend the theatre and come away 
before it is over — a most dull play! 

154 



You go home. You would rather go to jail. 
What a terrible house I 

There you find that Susie is sick of a fever. 
She has been sent home from school. You are 
In a helpless panic. 

Yet — ^you are a despicable cur. For down in 
your heart you are happy because little Susie is 
not well. And you send a telegram "Come 
home." You know the child's sickness Is not se- 
rious. You know why, really, you send that mes- 
sage. 

She returns. She does not reproach you. She 
says, **I am so glad to get back." And you send 
up a little prayer asking heaven to forgive you 
for ever thinking you were fit to live with her. 

She is here once more. You have been re- 
lieved of the Insufferable condensed presence of 
her absence. 

It may be hard to live with a woman; but it is 
impossible to live without her. 



155 



KNOCKING ON WOOD 

"How are your headaches now?" I inquired. 

"Haven't had one for three days,'* she an- 
swered, and reached over and rapped her knuck- 
les on the table. 

"How's business?" I asked a man. 

"Fine!" he replied. "It's coming great. The 
best month we've had in three years." Then he 
knocked on wood. 

We knock wood to keep away bad luck. 

The theory seems to be that if you say any- 
thing about being fortunate you invite evil for- 
tune. 

If you are healthy, watch out; some disease or 
accident is "laying" for you. 

If you are making money, be careful; whisper 
it only, lest fate overhear you and hand you dis- 
aster. 

It is a most common habit of mind, and a most 
absurd and dangerous one. The philosophy it is 
founded on is a lie. The effect of believing it is 
harmful. 

Why are we afraid to be happy? There are 
people who cannot attend a joyous family dinner, 

156 



where everybody is well, the children full of 
laughter and the old folks of contentment, but 
they say, "I wonder which of us will be the one 
to die first." 

If you have got Into this way, quit it. In- 
stead of hesitating to admit you are prosperous, 
be afraid rather to admit you are not prosperous. 

Why do we love to tell of our pains, our sad- 
ness, our defeats, our limitations? 

If you will cease this silly custom, dwell on 
your pleasant phases and cultivate the advertise- 
ment of your success, you will be glad of it. 

For you will be more contented. Your mind 
will be filled with agreeable thoughts. You will 
sleep better. 

And you will do better work. Your hand will 
be surer, your brain clearer. If your mind Is 
full of success, outside successes will fly to you 
as birds to their nest. 

When disappointments occur, forget them; 
don't dwell on them, conceal them, don't speak of 
them. If you have bodily ailments, don't allude 
to them. If you have lost money, or If you have 
been snubbed, dismiss the occurrence from your 
mind. 

Face the sun. 

Think every night of the good things that have 
happened to you during the day. If none, then 
think of those that are going to happen the mor- 
row. 

157 



Thoughts are mind food. Eat cheerful, hope- 
ful, vigor-giving thoughts. Fearful thoughts are 
Indigestible. They poison you. They take the 
pep out of you. 

Bad things may happen to you; but why think 
about them? 

Knocking on wood Is actually wicked. Trust 
the future. Invite your luck. Believe In the co- 
operation of the universe. Believe that whoever 
God may be, He Is your friend. 

Why not? 



158 



QUIET AND DARKNESS 

Amelia E. Barr (what reader of books does 
not love her, has not loved her, lo! these many 
years?) Is eighty-four years old, at the date I 
write this, and at work on her sixty-sixth novel. 

In an article In the Ladies' Home Journal she 
tells of the methods by which she is able to write 
f\vt or six hours a day at her present age. 

She speaks of encouraging new thoughts, of 
the advantage of frequent change of occupation, 
of avoiding worry and anger, of simple food, of 
the upkeeping power of love, and of the more or 
less commonly preached health hints; but a strik- 
ing thing she says is this: 

"I am in bed between 8 and 9 in the evening. 
For I like to be ten hours in the quiet and 

DARKNESS, THOUGH I MAY NOT SLEEP MORE THAN 
SEVEN HOURS.'' 

Quiet and darkness! 

Strong, rich words, and full of meat! Among 
all the things you strive for and get, do you find 
these two things in plenty? 

All forms of life need them. The plant can- 
not bloom continuously; it must lie its time in the 

159 



earth, in quiet and darkness. Trees have their 
winter rest. All animals must sleep. 

The human being cannot maintain efficient life 
unless it retreats daily into death, back to noth- 
ingness, cessation, stillness. 

When we lie down at night in sleep all the vis- 
ible workmen of the body set about their tasks, 
cleaning, repairing, restoring, adjusting, just as 
the cleaners go over a locomotive when It comes 
In from Its run. These workers operate only In 
quiet and darkness. 

It Is the same with the mind. Keep constantly 
on the go and your thoughts get clogged, you 
have confusion. Imperfect judgment, awkward- 
ness. Go home, go to bed, take ten hours' quiet 
and darkness, and see how refreshed you will 
emerge. 

Most of the worries and complications that be- 
set us would vanish of themselves If we would 
take a long bath in quiet and darkness. 

Those sudden Inspirations that bring success, 
those brilliant meteors of thought, one of which 
Is worth hours of plodding, love to come to us 
In the long stretches of quiet and darkness. 

Evil, fevered, extravagant, hurtful ideas and 
beliefs are usually the waste and by-product of 
too much activity; they dissolve In quiet and 
darkness. 

Often we petulantly say we "want to die." 
The expression has an element of truth in It. 

1 60 



Why not die once a day, die into long quiet and 
darkness? The morning will be a veritable res- 
urrection. 

No noise, no light, no forthputting of any kind, 
just to lie still and let wave after wave of noth- 
ingness flow over you, as you go back to that 
non-being from whence you came, back to the nil 
from which God made you — quiet and darkness. 

Never mind whether you sleep or not. Just 
be still. It is in quiet and darkness you hear 
those still, small voices your life misses in its 
hurly-burly. It is there you find God. It is 
there you find even a greater stranger — yourself. 



i6i 



FACES 

Along State street, in Chicago, streams an 
unceasing river of faces, a swelling and .ebbing 
Mississippi. Along Washington street, in Bos- 
ton, another flood. Along Broadway, New 
York, another. 

Who has sailed these waters has had experi- 
ences stranger than those of voyagers of the 
Amazon or the far River of Doubt. 

Every day they run at full tide; every night 
they thin and vanish. 

When you breasted these rivers of faces you 
saw thousands of souls glancing at you, as the 
sun flashes in midstream from myriad ripples. 
Ghosts, strange, mysterious things called souls, 
enveloped you. You swam the infinite. 

Faces — sad, withered. Intent, careless, happy, 
gloomed, sunny. Every one with a life struggle 
behind It. Every one speaking Its hopes, dreads, 
comedies, and tragedies in the mute language of 
eye-shine and lip-curve. 

Faces! There goes one stamped with pride, 
set in self-sufficiency, a challenge of egotism. 
There goes a young one, lit with wonder. Yon- 

162 



der Is a bitter one, behind It a snarling heart. 
Here is a child's face, eager, full of the joy of 
the world, fronting the universe as If It were all 
a gay show. 

Do not pass them by, intent on your own er- 
rand, as bored voyagers sail through historic 
rivers and occupy themselves with playing cards 
In the smoke-room. Look at them. Study 
them. Sense them. 

Each one is a hieroglyph of that unknown Be- 
ing who thinks in terms of souls, who goes on 
making His endless experiment of mankind. 
What do these faces mean? Eternal enigma, 
insolvable as the crowded stars, as the swarm of 
microscopic lives! 

Unending procession ! It passed here before 
you were born, planning, loving, crime seeking, 
pleasure hunting, noble and base; it is the same 
now, ever new, ever the same; as the old Tiber 
sweeps by Rome, the Tiber fresh from the melt- 
ing snows of this spring, yet the same Tiber into 
which leaped Horatlus. 

The human face is the masterpiece of the Cre- 
ator, upon which He has been working, lo ! these 
long eons, slowly perfecting, through beast and 
bird, something through which a spirit can ex- 
press itself. 

When you smile, when you frown, you perform 
an act that it took millions of centuries to make 
possible. 

163 



Mark ! That one there ! It is the hundredth 
man's. It Is a face wherefrom beam kindness, 
heartiness, good fellowship, vast patience, tem- 
pered wisdom. You want to stop him and speak, 
yet you know not what to say. He cheers you. 
He seems a golden galleon sailing among soiled 
and battered craft. 

And that woman! You try not to stare, but 
your eyes follow her. Goodness, sweetness, the 
divine, the eternal feminine, are in her face. 

Such faces haunt you, and breed in you a love 
for humanity. 



164 



SOME DAY 

Some day poverty, unemployment and unjust 
inequality in wages will disappear under the per- 
fect organization of democracy. 

Some day war will be unthinkable and impos- 
sible under a rational organization of world gov- 
ernment. 

Some day such political units as Germany and 
France can no more fight than Ohio and Indiana 
can now declare war. 

Some day humanity shall swallow up patriot- 
Ism. 

Some day every woman shall have all the rights 
and privileges before the law that men have. 

Some day every child shall be considered as the 
ward of the state and shall be trained at state 
expense until maturity; no more unfit units shall 
be added to the body of citizenship. 

Some day our system of education shall be built 
upon the principle of developing what is in the 
individual child. 

Some day there will be no more summer vaca- 
tions nor recesses, but education shall be through 
play and the child shall be under training all the 
time. 

165 



Some day no rich man shall be allowed to en- 
dow a church, a school or a charity; but such In- 
stitutions shall be controlled by the people. 

Some day all people shall be Interested In pol- 
itics, all children shall be schooled In the art of 
self-government, and the people shall manage 
their own accumulated wealth units. 

Some day wealth will be limited, so that no 
individual shall be allowed to own, or to bequeath 
by will, over a certain sum. 

Some day the people, through the state, shall 
provide amusements as conscientiously as they 
now provide jails. 

Some day training in music shall be universally 
compulsory. 

Some day as much attention shall be given to 
the beauty and joy of life as is now given to 
money making. 

Some day religion shall cease to be a question 
of sectarian management, and the state shall pro- 
vide for the ethical training of every one of Its 
children upon the basis of the greatest common 
divisor of all creeds. 

Some day race pride, race prejudice, and race 
superiority will be recognized as the humbugs they 
are. 

Some day tariffs shall all be abolished. 

Some day competition shall no longer be the 
rule among civilized people, but co-operation. 

i66 



Some day country life shall be organized so as 
to be as attractive to the masses as city life. 

Some day government will prohibit the sale of 
habit-forming drugs, including alcoholic drinks; 
and shall not allow the manufacture or sale of 
any foodstuffs that are not strictly nutritious and 
pure. 

Some day preventive medicine and hygiene 
shall replace dosing. 

Some day the literature of the people shall not 
be dependent upon advertisers. 

Some day we shall outgrow political parties 
and manage our own government by so organ- 
izing democracy as to include every human unit. 

Some day the state shall cease to punish and 
begin to heal and help; then we shall have no 
more criminal class. 

Some day there shall be no more kings, royal 
families, hereditary nobles, millionaires, or other 
persons of unearned privilege; but every baby 
born shall "start at the scratch" and have equal 
opportunity with every other baby. 

"There's a good time coming, boys, 

A good time coming; 
We may not live to see the day, 
But earth shall glisten in the ray 

Of the good time coming. 
• ••••• 

The proper impulse has been given; 

Wait a little longer." 

167 



HALF FAITH AND VIOLENCE 

All noise is waste. 

If you could bottle up the roar of the locomo- 
tive and retain the rattle of the trolley car, you 
would have that much more power. 

The woman screams loudest in an argument 
who is least certain she is right. 

We raise our voice in contention in proportion 
as we are uncertain. 

The man who wants to fight, or to bet, is not 
quite sure of himself. 

The religious fanatic is afraid of his suppressed 
doubts. If he believed absolutely he would not 
want to persecute. 

"Who lights the fagot? 
Not the full faith, but the lurking doubt." 

The boy, coming home on a dark night, whis- 
tles, not because he isn't afraid, but because he is. 

When a labor union resorts to violence, and 
when an employer refuses to arbitrate, it means 
they have strong doubts as to the justice of their 
positions. 

Violence always implies a lack of trust in onc*s 
cause. 

i68 



Militarism is the expression of tht conscious- 
ness of injustice. 

All our bluster, brag, and blow are explosions 
of our hidden cowardice. 

The man who knows he is right is quiet. He 
abides the decision of destiny. He trusts in the 
inevitableness of the higher laws. 

Justice has no sword. We don't hang men and 
imprison men because we know what to do with 
them : it is because we don't know. Every prison 
expresses our ignorance, impotence, and indiffer- 
ence. 

The effective school teacher, who perfectly con- 
trols the pupils, is low voiced. 

It is the weak mother that scolds, slaps, and 
tirades. 

It is faith we lack; faith in the great, irresist- 
ible, cosmic powers of right and truth. 

Millions of men have fought for the truth, for 
their rights. They are in forgotten graves. One 
man refused to fight, gave himself up, and was 
crucified. He transformed the world. 

It is the half-believer who wants to defend the 
truth. The whole-believer smiles when the truth 
is assailed, knowing that it is almighty, and needs 
no defense, but will defend those who believe in 
it 

Be still! If you arc not sure of yourself, act 
as if you were. 



169 



THE INEVITABLE 

Up comes the inevitable sun in the morning. 
Down he goes at night. Countless ages before I 
was born he did this; and after I am gone he shall 
go on for countless ages. 

The inevitable moon fills and wanes. The stars 
keep their places. I have nothing to do with them. 
Some one, other than I, disposes them. 

Beneath my feet is the inevitable earth. It 
bears me, it has borne millions, it will remain 
when we are swept away. 

Behind me is the inevitable past. Not even 
God can change it. It Is forever there, as a hard 
mountain. It Is there, as letters chiselled in the 
granite of time. 

Inevitable also is the future. Calamity or suc- 
cess is walking toward me. No hand can stay 
them; no prayers turn them from our meeting 
place. 

My heart beats, my lungs breathe, my internal 
organs function. Somebody else is causing them 
to operate. I have nothing to do with them. I 
sit a tenant In this body, not mine; a stranger 
among forces I cannot control. 

170 



Inevitable thoughts come to me; pain, sorrow, 
desire, joy. They descend upon my mind like the 
hail from heaven. Where do they come from? 
Why this intruding fancy, or that inexplicable 
longing? 

Inevitable men and women meet me. What 
had I to do with choosing my parents, my 
brothers? 

We encounter one another, you and I, to-day 
upon the street, in a hotel, a train, a crowd. We 
call it a chance acquaintance, but you and I have 
been moving toward this place for ten thousand 
years. 

Just as in a swirling rainstorm every drop of 
water is governed by the same inexorable laws 
that mould the stars, as in a flurry of dust every 
particle is as rigidly controlled by natural forces 
as is the planet itself on which we live, so in all 
the apparent hit and miss of men's doings, in all 
the conflicts and balances of wills, destiny was 
leading you and me to come together here. 

In the midst of all this inevitableness Is a little 
flaming miracle. It is my will, it Is I, doing as I 
please. Yet as the colt can frolic In the pasture, 
but cannot get by the fence, so all my freedom is 
circumscribed by the Inevitables. 

I was born. I will die. Events will come to 
me, not as I will, but as the stars will. 

Wherein then Is happiness? It Is in adjusting 
my little freedom to fit the inevitable. 

171 



Great forces, like heat, gravitation, electricity, 
stream through matter. And a great will streams 
through all happenings. An unseen tendency and 
purpose streams through life. 

These things no man can understand, no man 
can alter or in least wise compel. He must sub- 
mit. 

He finds his real success and happiness in real- 
izing the inevitables and in using them as best he 
may. 

"Our wills are ours, we know not why, 
Our wilk are ours, to make them Thine." 



172 



THE BELLICOSE EGO 

"There is only one way to get the better of a 
man/' says Vance Thompson, In his recently pub- 
lished delightful volume, "The Ego Book," "and 
that Is to understand him better than he does 
you." 

He goes on to explain that this Is equally true 
of a friend and an enemy, as there Isn't after all 
much difference between the two. 

This Is a most searching shaft. It pierces the 
very marrow of contention. It shows why we 
quarrel, why we hate, why we misunderstand. 

Almost all repulsions between two people are 
caused by lack of Imagination. We see only our- 
selves, understand only our own feelings, views, 
and position. 

If any one will sit down and strive to transfer 
himself Into his friend's or his enemy's breast, to 
grasp the other's thought, he will find that the 
hostility that separates them Is unreal, a mist, 
maya. 

"Put yourself In his place." There never was 
a better rule. 

If we will try to make real to ourselves the 

173 



state of another's mind, instead of trying to im- 
pose our notions upon him, it will make short 
shrift of disputes. 

There is no more use in subduing another's 
opinion than there is in one nation conquering 
another. A conquered territory is an expense and 
a continual source of disturbance. England, for 
instance, gets a deal more good out of America 
by letting her govern herself, by dealing with her 
as a separate unit, than she would by taking over 
her government. As the whole conquest idea is a 
delusion, so the whole convincing-by-argument is 
a delusion. 

You can live with me, do business with me, and 
get along socially with me, a lot better by allow- 
ing me to have my own notions, and by endeavor- 
ing to understand them, than you can by seeking 
to make me adopt your notions. 

Unity of opinion is quite impossible. Even if 
possible it would be undesirable. It is difference 
of opinion that is interesting. For opinion is per- 
sonality, and uniform personalities would be in- 
tolerable. 

The only practical union of personalities is 
union in work, in play, and in love. A socialist 
and a monarchist can build a bridge together, play 
a game of tennis together, and can sincerely love 
one another, provided they don't try to club each 
other's opinions into conformity to their own. 

What a world of domestic infelicity would be 

174 



avoided if man and wife would let each other's 
ideas alone, if they would endeavor to grasp each 
other's views and to enter into them, instead of 
combating them. 

Even children we make thrive by leaving to 
them their liberty, by realizing that their ideas 
change by growth, by observation and by experi- 
ence, not by command and coercion. 

If we could restrain the bellicose ego! If we 
could hold down the lust of intellectual conquest ! 

If we could only understand each other and not 
oppose ! 

Then each of us could freely say what he thinks, 
and out of the free self-expression of all we could 
each grow in truth and come into perfect com- 
munity of effort and of esteem. 



ii75! 



SOMETHING FOR NOTHING 

When you get right down to the bottom of the 
question, the only out and out honest business 
transaction is the one in which both parties are 
profited. 

If I sell you a horse for a hundred dollars, the 
horse ought to be of more value than the money 
to you, and the money ought to be of more use 
than the horse to me. 

This is the underlying law of all trade, from 
swapping jackknives to selling a million dollars' 
worth of bonds. 

The complications of the business world are so 
great that it is often hard to tell whether a given 
deal, or a given line of money making, is ethical 
or not. But it is an excellent idea to keep in mind 
the basic rule that the only genuinely honorable 
deal is where the interests of both buyer and seller 
are advanced. 

It is plain enough that betting is immoral, for 
my gain is your loss. So in a lottery what I win 
represents the losings of others, even if the win- 
ning be concentrated in a large sum and the losses 

176 



be distributed in sums so small as to bear hard 
upon no one person. 

When we get into other affairs, however, the 
issue becomes confused. The safest method, for 
one who cares for his self-respect, Is to ask one's 
self, "Have I rendered any sort of service com- 
mensurate with the money or goods or favors I 
have received?*' 

The class of sons and daughters who accept the 
gifts or the inheritance of money from their 
parents, sanctioned by the laws of society, and 
who spend all they get In play. In idleness, and in 
selfish ends, rendering no value to society, is the 
most dangerous class in the community. 

They are doubly dangerous because vicious 
tradition causes us to consider them superior to 
common people who have to earn the bread they 
eat. They "look down upon trades-people." 
They regard "the working classes" as distinctly 
inferior. They spend their energies In going 
from one amusement to another; they cultivate 
polo, golf, yachting, and such other games as only 
the wealthy and the Idle can pursue. 

They are constantly aware that the mass of 
people envy them, are servile toward them and 
anxious for their favors. They are surrounded 
by an army of flatterers and sycophants. 

Hence they become Insolent, haughty, and as 
vain as they are useless. 

It Is these do-nothings who exasperate the 

177 



social conditions. They debauch the morals of 
the populace. They set up alluring and fake 
standards for the young. They embitter the 
working classes. They corrupt the institutions of 
learning. They debase the church. They vitiate 
the state. 

Their dangerous influence can all be traced 
back to the fact that they get something for 

WHICH THEY DO NOT RETURN AN EQUIVALENT. 

They might be of great service instead of be- 
ing a nuisance, if they would only set about doing 
some useful work. 

Any idle person is a septic spot in the com- 
munity. And the worst kind of an idle person is 
a rich idle person. 

It is not the giving of charity that can heal the 
curse of idle wealth; that only establishes more 
firmly the evil, in rendering the people servile by 
doing for them what they ought to do for them- 
selves. 

The only salvation for idlers is to find some 
part of the world's work to do and to do it. 

The man or woman who gets something for 
nothing ought to be barred from the society of 
decent people. 



178 



NEWS OF THE WEEK 

Great things have been happening during the 
past week. 

The dandelions have been out. Down the road 
toward Ed Smith's place, on each side of the high- 
way, set thick among the deep green of the grass, 
myriads of them are abloom; It Is as If the gray 
ribbon of road were broldered with living gold. 

Gold Is sprinkled all through the pastures. 
There Is no flower so decorative, so modestly yet 
exquisitely beautiful as the dandelion. 

One of the most delightful things about It Is its 
gospel, which is the wonderfulness of the com- 
monplace. All the wealth, all the art of man, 
could produce nothing that so drenches the spirit 
with pure joy of life as Nature does in her wild 
exuberance of dandelions. 

Go out and see these happy little flower-people, 
clean your stuffed bosom of its artificial cares, and 
love them, and they will do you good. Fools run 
after the uncommon; wise men turn for refresh- 
ment to the common. 

I wish to report also that I have found the 
xnost sweet and adorable hour of the day. It is 

179 



the one just before daybreak, when the baby dawn 
is just beginning to awaken. It is the solo hour 
of Nature. All day the full orchestra of birds has 
been cawing, whistling, piping, and fluting away; 
at sunset and thick night. 

. . . for music came the play 
Of the pied frog's orchestra, 
And to light the noisy choir 
Lit the fly his lamp of fire; 

there have been the full crash of noonday sun- 
shine, the splendor and color riot of sunset, the 
soft threnody of twilight, and then the majestical 
panorama of the stars swimming in the immense 
upper ocean of the dark sky. 

But at this solo hour of which I speak there is, 
for a setting, the glory of fathomless stillness. 
No breeze is a-wanderlng. The trees are asleep. 
The mirror-breast of the lake Is unwrlnkled. It 
Is as smooth as the just paling heavens above it. 

One bird, a stranger to me, Is twittering — some 
uneasy, Industrious bird that would prevent the 
dawn and get about Its day's work. 

One bright star gleams like a blue jewel In the 
east, the forerunner of the sun. The other stars 
are out; this high lamp Is still unextinguished. 

One feathery cloud hangs over the door where 
the sun shall enter. 

Nature is In her simplest, her most unconfuscd, 
her least complex mood. 

i8o 



The young day Is lisping. 

The soul that is early about, and moves among 
the vast simplicities, feels as If It were present at 
the world^s creation. 

In Rome, by the Tiber, Is a small temple, round 
and pillared, said to have been erected to the 
goddess of the Dawn, Mater Matuta. 

If you have no belief in her, come out at this 
solo hour, and walk along the road gold-sprent 
with dandelions, listen to that one bird singing, 
look at that one star, that lone cloud, receive with 
unbarred heart the message of the vast stillness 
around you, and or ever you are aware you will 
see, not face to face, but out of the tail of your 
eye, as all divinities can alone be glimpsed. Mater 
Matuta herself, the silent, sweet virgin mother of 
the universe, the shyest and gentlest among all 
the denizens of Olympus. 



iSv 



UNCONSCIOUS GOODNESS 

This Is not written for the many, but for the 
few who understand. 

Confess your sins, if you will, but not your 
goodness. 

A high and noble quality in you. If It Is once 
brought to light, withers as a flower plucked from 
its bed In the woods and worn on your dress. 

There Is no real purity but that of which you 
are unconscious. This permeates you and flavors 
your personality. The minute it is exposed by 
boasting It becomes offensive. 

I doubt If preaching, moralizing, arguing and 
otherwise definitely laboring with people to make 
them good has ever been of much real benefit. 
The actual uplift Is that force that lies within our 
nature, concealed In the texture of the soul. 

The cosmic powers of souls are silent and in- 
visible ; as the sun attracts the planets by Its mass, 
as the hyacinth perfumes the room by Its pres- 
ence. 

When you tell of a good deed you have done 
you have spoiled It. That instinct Is correct 
which leads the brave man to belittle his own 

182 



courage. No act is fine unless It be done solely 
to gratify ourself, solely to win the praise of our 
own exacting soul; the bloom of virgin beauty is 
rubbed off from our nobleness when it is to get 
the approbation of others. 

We complain that our efforts are not appre- 
ciated. Whatever is appreciated is depreciated. 
Only those helpful deeds that no one knows, 
which we ourselves do not recognize, are of the 
purest gold. 

No one will be more surprised on the day of 
judgment than the genuine saints, who will ex- 
claim In amazement: *'Lord, when saw we thee 
sick, or ahungered, or In prison, and ministered 
unto thee?'* 

Action and speech, doing and talking, and all 
sorts of conscious exertion, are of second class, 
compared with the high worth of being. 

This is proved by little children, who, we are 
shocked to discover, are not much Influenced by 
our lecturlngs, and disregard our advice, but 
whose eyes penetrate to what we really are, whose 
ears hear the voices of our character; so that they 
follow us, but not our words. 

No deeds of mine can counteract the subtle 
dynamic of my personal Influence. If I endow 
churches and colleges, if I feed multitudes of the 
poor. If I give my body to be burned, and yet 
if I am essentially mean, my net result in the 
world Is bad. On Time's books the debit of niy 

183 



character will outbalance the credit of my eiiort. 

The day will come, when humanity is mature, 
that there shall be no more of what we now call 
charity or benevolence. For charity is the con- 
scious attempt to correct the injustice of our ac- 
ceptance of unjust customs. 

In the perfect day to come no man will give to 
relieve another's distress, none will work to con- 
vert and redeem, for each shall try to do justice; 
and where there is universal justice all charity is 
swallowed up. 

Then set loyalty to yourself as your goal. 
Think, speak and act to get that inner praise of 
your own being. Regard yourself as fortunate 
when you can do good without being found out. 

And consider yourself most fortunate of all 
when you are not appreciated, when you are mis- 
understood, and when your good is called evil. 
For then you are one of the real aristocrats of 
virtue. Then you are truly of a kin to God, who 
is forever silent, forever cavilled at, yet forever 
healing and helping by His very existence. 



184 



LEGEND 

Legend Is truer than history. History Is what 
happened, legend Is what ought to have happened. 

History Is an attempt to record facts. But who 
can be trusted to understand a fact well enough 
to tell It? Sir Walter Raleigh set about once to 
write a history of the world; one day he saw an 
occurrence under his own windows, and afterward 
when he heard a half dozen discordant witnesses 
tell of It, he was amused at his own temerity In 
presuming to record events years after all the 
witnesses were dead. 

Who knows the secret springs of history, the 
story behind the story? We have Genesis, but 
the genesis of Genesis has disappeared forever. 
We have Matthew, but where Is the sub-Matthew? 

The forces behind history are as strange as 
those behind the Inscrutable face of Nature. 

But In legend history becomes simple, under- 
standable. It is a true picture of a race*s inner 
life, of its dreams, ambitions, fears. 

There is no history of Greece so true as its 
mythology. The people probably lived along, 
fought, loved and died, and struggled In the sor- 

185 



didness of circumstance, very much as we ; but the 
best part of themselves were the golden fancies 
with which they populated the heavens, the seas, 
the woods, and the dark. 

Legend is tougher and longer lived than fact. 
Hercules and Perseus, Theseus and Orpheus are 
still vigorous personages in the world's mind, 
while the leading citizens that discussed the plays 
of iEschylus are vanished into thin air. 

We have a feeling even among present events 
that the newspapers are somehow deceiving us. 
What mass of news they hold back! How col- 
ored is what they print! There is no such thing 
as giving all the news. The public would not 
stand it. 

Besides, to tell the truth is difficult; it is an art 
few have mastered. "Openheartedness," said 
Kant, **the saying of the whole truth we know of, 
is not to be met with in human nature." 

It is in its purely imaginative work a people 
most truly expresses itself. So Wagner went to 
myth, and not to recorded history for his motifs. 
There is more truth about the English people in 
Percy's Reliques than in Macaulay's history. 

There is an allegory of Pushkin that is in point, 
expressing the truth that, whoever would know a 
people, must study the people's folk lore. 

By the side of the Blue Sea 
Is a great and green oak tree, 

1 86 



Girt with a golden chain. 
Day and night a marvellous and learned cat 
Crawls around this oak. 
When he crawls to the right he sings a song; 
When he crawls to the left he tells a story. 
It is there you must sit down and learn 
The understanding of Russian legends. 
There the spirit of Russia and the fantasy of our ancestors 
come to life again. 

It is the same with the individual. The games 
you played, the longings you entertained, the 
visions you glimpsed, when a child, have more to 
do with your character than any hard happenings 
of your maturer years. 

To understand any man you must go back to 
the cat and the oak. 



187 



THE SILENCES 

I WENT down by the seashore, and after long 
'watching and dreaming I fancied it was given me 
to understand the voice of the waters. 

And the waters said to me, *'You wonder why 
we do not talk to you. We are talking ever and 
forever; but you have never, till now, been still 
enough to listen. 

"The three voices, that of Nature, that of God, 
and that of Love, are never perfectly heard ex- 
cept at the bottom of the funnel of silence. 

*'There are few of your race who understand 
wind-sounds and the notes of birds, water voices, 
cloud-writings, and the signals that are wig- 
wagged to souls by waving trees, and the color- 
ideas that are spelled to them by flowers. 

*'You wonder why you cannot comprehend bird 
talk, as people do in fairy stories. You speculate 
as to whether monkeys communicate real ideas by 
their chatter, and whether cock-crows and hen- 
cackles are mere noise or have Intelligent contents. 

"Your difficulty lies In that you do not realize 
the extent, the range of ideas. You know that 
there are sounds of too high and others of too 

i88 



low vibration for the human ear to perceive. 
You know also that the colors perceptible to the 
human eye are comparatively few; that there are 
colors, beyond violet and beyond red, that are too 
subtle for the eye. 

"It is precisely so with thoughts or soul vibra- 
tions. There is a whole world of ideas too sim- 
ple for you to grasp, and another world of ideas 
too complex for you to grasp. Human beings 
think only a few notes in the middle of the gamut 
of Nature. 

*'I can only hint at our meanings, mine and the 
winds' and the birds'. We speak of such great 
realities as Alternation and Continuance, of 
Whirling Years and the Time Wheel, of Fecunda- 
tion, Generation and Dissolution, of Star Mean- 
ings, of Lives and of their Masks and Appear- 
ances, of the walled-off yet interlocked Worlds, 
such as the World of Fishes, the World of In- 
sects, the World of Microbes, the World of Field 
Mice, the World of Human Creatures, the World 
of the Unborn, and the World of the Dead. 

"We speak of the deep, voiceless Instincts, of 
the meaning of Heat and Cold, of the mysteries 
of Food, Drink and Sleep. We talk of the trag- 
edies of Danger and of the comedies of Play. 
These are famous topics with barnyard creatures. 
The rats and roaches in your house discuss them. 
They interest the insects and the little woods- 
people. 

189 



"We have our Laughter, though not as yours, 
for the universe is saturated with humor. We 
have our days of Mourning and of Loneliness, 
we have our Sins and our Remorse ; sunt lachrimae 
re rum. 

**There are two kinds of humans that under- 
stand us, the witless and the worshipful." 

Then I was aware that my friend was shaking 
me. 

*What is the matter with you?" he said. "I 
have called you several times. Have you gone 
crazy?" 

"Only part way," I answered. "Tell me why 
we are accounted sane only so long as we keep to 
the limitations of the ordinary; and that we never 
see the truth of poetry, religion, or nature until 
we overstep the limits? Is all greatness mad- 
ness?" 

"Give it up!" returned my friend; and yet he 
was a hatter and measured the human head for a 
living I 



T90 



THE ETERNAL COMPROMISE 

You can win at a game, but In real life it is 
usually a draw. 

When you ask history, "Which whipped?'' the 
answer is, "Neither." 

The great historic struggles, political, religious, 
racial, have resulted in compromise, at least in 
something neither side expected. 

The conflict between paganism and early Chris- 
tianity was waged bitterly. The Christianity that 
conquered became half pagan; witness the tri- 
umph of pagan nationalism over the Christian 
idea of humanity's solidarity, in the present war. 

So the world-old war between idealism and ma- 
terialism, the eternal party issue of philosophers. 
Berkeley proved to his own satisfaction that there 
is nothing but spirit. Buechner and Haeckel were 
fully convinced there is no spirit — only matter. 

Rome conquered Greece, but Greece in turn, 
by its art and intellect, dominated Rome. The 
church imposed Itself upon the world; it was a 
dear success, for the world permeated the church. 

Which will win, socialism or individualism? 
Judging from the past we must say, neither or 

191 



both. The fight between the two will probably 
go on, with varying success, with a series of con- 
tinuous compromises; just as the unabated cen- 
trifugal and centripetal forces balance the stars. 

A certain communism is indispensable. But so 
is a certain independence. 

The uncompromising logician, the propagand- 
ist, the enthusiast, the apostle of an ideal, sees 
that he has the absolute truth, which finally will 
prevail. He is mistaken. No man or set of men 
ever held the whole truth. The opposite of every 
truth is also true. 

Things must struggle on. Men must contend. 
Out of the conflict comes at last destiny's curious 
conclusion. 

The same law runs through the commoner re- 
lations of life. Every man's success is a compro- 
mise. No human being ever accomplished what 
he started out to do. The sculptor, the painter, 
the musician, the business man, find at last they 
have done but a half-work. Nowhere is absolute 
success. 

There is no happy marriage without contin- 
ual "conciliation, concession, and compromise.'^ 
Marriage is a perpetual triumph only as it is a 
perpetual surrender. 

Our children do not satisfy us, nor we them. 
We make the best of it. 

The best we can do with life is to establish a 
workable "modus vivendi." 

'192 



Fate has Its own plans. The Eternal has His 
own will. 

In the great edifice of humanity, in the toil and 
moil of building the race that is to be, it is given 
to no man to look at the plan the Almighty has 
traced upon the trestle-board. 

All we can do is to stand for the truth as we 
see it, and remember that truth is manifold and 
complex, and others may see it differently. 



193 



THE GREEN CITY OF LAUGHTER 

There's no use gilding the pill. Work is dis- 
agreeable, and the joys of labor are forms of that 
optimistic self-hypnotism that buoys so many lift- 
yourself-by-the-bootstraps cults. 

I hate work; I always have hated it. When I 
was a boy I loathed bringing in the coal and weed- 
ing the strawberry patch. I liked to play ball and 
go swimming. 

I still hate all forms of work. But I have dis- 
covered how to make play out of it; and I enjoy 
play. 

My job is more fun than any form of diversion 
I can indulge in after working hours. I would 
rather do my daily stunt than play golf or go to 
the ball game or attend the theatre. I am lOO 
per cent happier on my task than off. 

And I think this is the solution of the "labor 
problem." It is to solve how work may be made 
play. 

When we take pride and interest in what we 
do it is not work. The housekeeper that delights 
in keeping her rooms in order, the clerk that en- 
joys performing his duties, the doctor that is en- 

194 



thusiastic over his profession, the carpenter, 
plumber, painter, or teamster that puts his soul 
into his business — such people work does not gall 
nor fret. Such have solved the *'labor problem." 

Machinery is slowly lifting the curse of labor 
from men. A vast deal of the dirty work that 
used to be done by hand is done by steam. The 
huge dredges at Panama did the task of hundreds 
of men with shovels and buckets. 

Every child should be given a training in some 
kind of useful activity that is congenial to him. 
The time Is past when there Is a chance for the 
man who Is ''willing to do anything"; It Is the 
man who Is capable of doing "something," and of 
doing it well, that Is employed. 

More and more this world Is becoming a colder 
and harder place for the person who simply wants 
the wage. Those who love their trade so well 
that It Is play, who are miserable when they can- 
not work at It, and who are trained to skilfulness 
in It, are driving out the wage wanters. 

Every factory, mill, office, farm, store, and rail- 
road In the country Is crying out for fit, capable, 
enthusiastic hands who will attack work in the 
spirit of play. 

And only so Is good work done. 

Says Coningsby Dawson in The Craftsman: 

"Play may be the best kind of work — the dif- 
ference between work and play is a difference in 
training and mental attitude. Teach a child to 

195 



play sadly and call his play work — ^you make him 
a laborer who toils even when he is playing. 

*'Ugliness and drudgery are no part of God^s 
plan for His world. If man insists on inventing 
them God leaves man to do the explaining. Boys 
and girls playing in a green city of laughter — ^that 
was what God meant. 

*'Gray faces everywhere! Men and women 
who know anything but how to earn bread! In 
the crouching tread of cities the sound of the fear 
of life and the terror of death ! And yet always 
between the stone cities lies the green City of 
Laughter where work is play, where birds sing as 
they build their nests, and rivers flow silver 
through meadows, certain of the sea and un- 
hurrying. 

"The day is coming when, one by one, our wise 
men, like the old Eastern dreamer, will steal out 
from the walls of work into the grassy Metropolis 
of Laughter. There the work will still go on, 
but unknowingly. No one will be old; the streets 
of that city will be full of boys and girls playing." 



196 



THE CHEMISTRY OF THOUGHT 

When a gay pair of hydrogen atoms seize an 
oxygen atom and begin to fox trot about among 
the molecules the three of them together are 
water, a different looking thing entirely from the 
gas each of them was before they joined hands. 

So when wood burns, the union of the oxygen 
and carbon makes flame, wholly another thing 
than dull wood. 

The chemistry of matter is interesting. But no 
less so is the chemistry of Ideas. The product 
arising from the union of two thoughts Is often 
quite distinct from either of the constituents. 

For Instance, a nagging woman will hand her 
lord and master a thought which makes him ex- 
plode like powder — he goes off In a rage. Neither 
can understand. She looks on her remark as In- 
nocent. He regards his mind as guiltless. It was 
the mixing of the two that was deadly. 

We often play hob with the truth, not because 
truth Is harmful In Itself, but because we do not 
understand the chemistry of Ideas. It may be 
perfectly true that I look a fright, that I am fat 
and awkward, but when you Insert that truth Into 

197 



my mind and it unites with my vanity and self- 
esteem it produces a dangerous heat, so that I 
fume and say things. 

It is a wise person who understands this kind 
of chemistry. It is a clever salesman, for exam- 
ple, who not only knows the ^'talking points" of 
his goods but also perceives the notions that his 
customer already entertains, and gives to him 
only the kind of talk that, combining with those 
notions, will produce a desire to buy, and not 
hostility. 

It is a wise wife that can administer to her hus- 
band those remarks that will make him prize and 
love her. She doubtless could tell him other 
things, just as true, that would make him wish 
she were in Guinea; but what's the use? 

It takes two to tell the truth, said Thoreau. 
Anybody can hear a great fact; but not every- 
body is supplied with the kind of ideas that can 
grasp it, digest, and assimilate it. 

More than half of the opera, the play, the 
sermon, the book, the landscape, is the collection 
of thoughts and feelings you bring to them. 

Love may mean two things to a man and a 
woman as different as the minds of the two per- 
sons. 

What kindles me may leave you cold. 

Religion may turn one man into a ferocious 
fanatic, and may make another man gentle and 
kind. 

198 



Salt is like neither chlorine nor sodium, and 
what you say to me becomes something that is 
neither what you said nor what I heard. 

All of us are handling ideas that may become 
poisons or explosives. It's a wonder we get along 
as well as we do. 



199 



MY ANCESTRY 

I AM very proud of my ancestors. 

My twice great-grandfather did not come over 
in the Mayflower. My six times great-grand- 
father did not belong to the bunch of bandits 
under William the Conqueror. 

As far as I know no uncle of mine was ever 
governor of Indiana nor Supreme Court judge 
In Kentucky. 

I have no family tree so long that somewhere 
about the middle of It Adam was born. 

The only real sure enough ancestor of note that 
I can boast Is Adam. I am one of the vast Adam 
family, though I have lost the name. 

Yet still I am proud of my forefathers. 

There were so many of them. 

My father and mother each had a father and 
mother; that Is, I had two grandfathers and two 
grandmothers, which makes four. 

Each of these four necessarily had a father and 
mother; so In the ascending generation I had 
eight ancestors. 

Calculating In this manner on back for the fifty- 
sixth generation — that is, to the time of Christ— 

200 



the number is of course raised to its fifty-sixth 
power. 

Hence, in order to introduce so important a 
person as I into the world, there has been the 
co-operation of some 132,245,015,480,534,978 
ladies and gentlemen — ^possibly also a few black- 
smiths and nursemaids. 

It is for this reason that I do not lower my 
helmet, to use the language of the Great Com- 
moner, to any man who points to the picture on 
his wall and brags about his grandpa being a 
judge. He has nothing on me. I have doubtless 
had several hundred judges in my line, also as 
many prisoners, attorneys, and bailiffs. 

When the lady preens herself before me, shows 
me the family album, with the photograph in it 
of her aunt, who once sang in a concert in Cin- 
cinnati, where the tickets were $1 apiece, I am 
not impressed; perhaps the whole audience were 
my kin. 



201 



SPELLING 

Anybody who Is laboring to make a dent In 
the dull putty of It-always-has-been, and to oper- 
ate therein a few holes of it-ought-to-be, has my 
sympathy. 

The whole realm of human thought Is forever 
threatened with smotheration by the gases of the 
decayed past. 

In religion, In politics, In art, in law, and In all 
forms of work every proposal of pure reason and 
sound sense is greeted with a chorus of woes from 
the army of standpatters. 

Nowhere Is this more marked than In the effort 
to reform English spelHng and make It conform 
to the lines of intelligence. 

The Englishman sticks to his pounds, shillings, 
and pence, and to his Inches, feet, and ells, and to 
his ounce and stone, and if he will not lay aside 
these medieval things for the beauty and sim- 
plicity of the metrical system we can hardly ex- 
pect him to use valor for valour and tire for tyre. 

But we are a progressive people over here and 
ought to be open to the convincing arguments of 
the spelling reformers. 

202 



The Simplified Spelling Board is pulling man- 
fully at the oar. Let us all help, and try to rid 
our wondrous language of its still more wondrous 
monstrosities. 

English Is the easiest language In the world to 
learn, because it Is a logical tongue and practi- 
cally grammarless; it has comparatively few in- 
flections and it is the tendency of time to elim- 
inate even these. 

Its horror is its spelling. Think of eight ways 
of representing the sound of short e ! Let, head, 
heifer, leopard, friend, many, said, says, and 
bury! 

And the old freak ough, which Richard Grant 
White showed up in his couplet: 

"Though the tough cough and hiccough plough me 

through, 
O'er life's dark lough my way I will pursue.'* 

Seven ways to pronounce ough! 

After all, the present spelling was not let down 
from heaven; Itself is a reform. Era used to be 
spelled aera, economic oeconomlcke, music musick, 
fish fyssche, fantasy phantasle, bat batte, and sun 
sunne. 

And *'Sh! Sh!" cries the Simplified Spelling 
Board. **What do you think of these sh's? 
Ship, sure, issue, mansion, mission, conscience, 
conscientious, suspicion, ocean, oceanic, partial, 

203 



partiality, schist, and machine!'^ Count 'em. 
Fourteen. 

*'Some persons,'* says the board, "ar so con- 
stituted that an unaccustomed spelling offends 
them. That Is mere emotion. Others ar so con- 
stituted that an unreasonable spelling offends 
them. That is the protest of reason." 

Let us begin. I would do it myself If the edi- 
tors and printer men would let me. Let us at 
least always use the simpler of two authorized 
forms: as program, catalog, rime, tho, dropt, 
stopt, blest, and the like. 

The following from one of the board's circu- 
lars, they assure me, Is not a puzzle; submit It to 
the children and let them find the best forms : 

"Island, Hand; ache, ake; dumb, dum; cata- 
logue, catalog; debt, det; head, hed; active, activ; 
health, helth; looked, lookt; column, colum; 
dimmed, dimd; twelve, twelv; felled, feld; 
dropped, dropt; promise, promis; examine, ex- 
amin; crossed, crost; definite, definit; campaign, 
campain; alphabet, alfabet; build, bild; guard, 
gard; paragraph, paragraf; doubt, dout; tongue, 
tung; pamphlet, pamflet." 



204 



THE PEANUT 

I WOULD lay a few wreaths at the feet of the 
peanut. 

It is one of the admirable arrangements of 
whoever runs mundane matters that the very best 
goods of life are for every man, and that the 
proud and privileged when they nibble their ex- 
pensive delicacies are toying with the avenging 
furies, from a pain in their tum-tums to harden- 
ing of the arteries. 

There is air, for instance, oodles of it, free; 
and if there be aught better I have never found 
it. Also water. Also sunshine. 

More expensive, but still cheap enough for 
dollar-a-day folk, is corn bread, the than whichest 
of all toothsome things. 

Right down below the high-cost-of-living list, 
down where the multitude mults, even below 
down where the Wurtzburger flows, are the little 
friends of hoi polloi, the peanuts. 

Item. They are good. A better nut has not 
been nutted. If they cost twenty-five cents apiece 
they would be served as hors d'ceuvres at the 
Grand Hotel de Luxe, and make glad the small 

205 



white teeth of the daughters of Milllonbucks. 

If they cost $ioo a nut their shells would be 
strung around the necks of the grilllonaires' ladies 
who unveil their beauty upon us the first night of 
the opera. 

Alas! They are five cents a bag. So they are 
nothing but just plain good. 

Item. They are nourishing. Faddists and 
medicine men have denounced all other kinds of 
food, white bread, sugar, coffee and milk, but 
none has dared to lift his voice against the peanut. 

A sack of peanuts is an excellent lunch. I so 
lunched yesterday. I bought a nickel's worth of 
Dante Alighieri, who keeps them hot at our cor- 
ner. I ate them for three blocks. It is a grand 
thing to lunch walking; you get your air, exercise, 
and nutrition all at once. 

They are still better eaten between meals. 
They are the ideal tid-bit for those who watch the 
baseball game. They are the right hand of the 
circus man. On trains they have no fellow, when 
there is no dining car and no stop for dinner. 

They are the true symbol of democracy. 

They are friends to lovers. Who can say how 
subtle are the opportunities of the paper of pea- 
nuts consumed by *'me and Mame" up In the 
third balcony, when our hands touch as we fish 
the gay goobers from the sack, and munch while 
we watch Lord Edward being foiled upon the 
stage? 

206 



The Star Spangled Banner may be the national 
tune, the golden rod or something else the na- 
tional flower, and the turkey and the eagle the na- 
tional birds, but the national nut is unquestionably 
the peanut. 

Sweet is the voice of the peanut man, as he 
sings: "Five cents, a nickel, half a dime. All 
ready and all hot. Right this way, ladies and 
gents, for your fresh roasted peanuts !*' 



207 



CUPBOARDS 

One of the first official acts of King Edward 
the Seventh, of happy memory, upon his accession 
to the throne, was to visit a model workhouse. 
After looking about at all the show-things the 
keepers of the institution had to exhibit, he asked : 

"But where are the cupboards?" 

The question, in its effect upon the overseers, 
trustees, and patrons, was what might be called a 
sockdolager. 

There were no cupboards. 

There were none belike in the place where his 
majesty made his home. That was the reason he 
asked for them In the poorhouse. 

Poorhouses and palaces, alas ! alike have no 
cupboards. Everything and everybody are merci- 
lessly open to public inspection. 

A cupboard is a place to put things you don't 
want but might want. It is the fortress of super- 
fluity; and without its superfluities what would 
life be? 

I loathe bare cupboards and painfully sympa- 
thize with Old Mother Hubbard and her dog. 

The technique of the thrifty boarding-house, 

208 



where the whole pile of provisions is gauged so 
nicely that it is cleaned out every meal, is not to 
my fancy. 

My notion of joy and gladness is to go to the 
cupboard, or icebox, which Is a species of cup- 
board, and see a whole ham, a whole roast turkey, 
a whole cold roast of beef, a big mince pie, a bar- 
rel of red apples, a jar heaped up with doughnuts, 
a colossal box of sugar cookies; and to hear a 
pleasant female voice say: 

"Now, help yourself, children; there's more 
where all that came from; and grocers' bills are 
cheaper than doctors' bills." 

But alas the dream! In decadent city purlieus, 
where we go down to the delicatessen and buy two 
dill pickles and eight cents' worth of sliced ham! 

There never were enough cupboards and closets 
in any house; and never enough in them. Linen 
cupboards, with heaps of towels, sheets, an:i 
table napery, clothes closets with different suits 
for every mood, cupboards with upper shelves 
crowded with books nobody ever reads. 

*'But have you not written upon the evils of 
superfluity?" Certainly. But that was a Tues- 
day. Fridays and Wednesdays I have other 
opinions. 

The mind has its cupboards likewise, and the 
soul. Have you never met those trying people 
who empty the whole of their ideas upon any sub- 
ject at once, almost indecently expose their entire 

209 



stock of morality, and altogether give you the Im- 
pression of a human show-window? 

No, no. Let the spirit of man also have its 
cupboards full of emergency meats, its cellar 
stored with unsuspected apples, its closets of lux- 
ury, and its attics and top-shelves choke-full, 
wherewith we may feel that delicious sense of 
plenty, that blessedest kind of riches to carnal and 
fallen man, being rich in the unnecessary, so that 
the stomach not only can enjoy to-day, but the 
mind can feast upon the reserves for to-morrow. 



210 



SHE 

The railway train is not, in Boone Centre, 
Illinois, a mere piece of machinery. It is a sort 
of person. They speak of it as "She." Her 
name is No. 7, or the 5.20. 

Everybody that can spare the times goes down 
to the station to see Her come in. A crowd of 
small boys is always there, especially the Kelleys 
and Gischweins, who are the outlaw chiefs of the 
community. They wrestle and whistle, and give 
lessons to the more respectable little boys in swear 
words and tobacco chewing, while waiting for 
Her. \ 

Emmeline Matthews, Carrie and Mame Cra- 
mer, besides the Tope girls, usually are on the 
platform when She comes in. They lock arms 
and stand around giggling, chewing gum and con- 
versing in their own language. When She comes 
in they "josh" the brakeman, Will Davis; the 
engineer yells his badinage at them and tickles 
them to death. The travelling man from Chicago 
knows them and they walk up to the St. James 
Hotel together, after She leaves. 

The Mason boys, who live on a farm up Bear 

211 



Creek way, are there. They get in the smoking 
car. They are going to Peoria to buy some hogs, 
and, by cricky! theyVe going to have some fun 
while they're there. They have a bottle of whis- 
key; but they never give it that name, referring 
to It rather as red eye, or sod corn, or O be joy- 
ful. Each of them Is smoking a five-cent cigar, 
holding it most of the time In the hand, and blow- 
ing out the smoke with a "koo-oo-oo !" But they 
are not fierce at all; they are just playing crim- 
inal. Really they are modest, kind-hearted, hard- 
working boys. 

The Chicago papers come in on this train. Eb 
Hopkins, who is the leading politician, is present 
to get a first copy out of the roll, to see what's 
going on. Grampa Bliss is also on hand regu- 
larlv; he takes two papers, both the Tribune and 
the News; he is very deaf, so that about all he 
can do is to read. He Is a good arguer, however, 
for he never hears what the other man says. 

The emperor of the occasion Is the station 
agent. The burden of his office weighs heavily 
on him. He throws in the mall bag, hands the 
train-order to the engineer, looks after the bag- 
gage and express, and answers questions. Every 
one is proud to know him. 

No. 7 has been carefully looked for. When 
She whistled, out by Downer's Grove, all the 
watches came out, and the verdict was rendered: 
"Eight minutes late!" Rolling, grumbling, hiss- 

212 



ing and ringing Her bell, She came to a stop. 
Each person alighting was carefully scrutinized. 
If his business was not known it was soon discov- 
ered. No man can stay over night in Boone Cen- 
tre without the Inhabitants knowing why. The 
people are not cold — they are very sociable; in- 
deed, socially they might be called hot. 

At last the conductor looks at his watch, glances 
forward and back along the train, waves his hand 
to the engineer, shouts "All aboard," and She be- 
gins to move. The engine gives a few big snorts, 
the bell rings, everybody says good-by, and away 
She goes. 

She disappears over the prairie. The folks re- 
turn home. The agent goes back to his chair at 
the telegraph table. 

Another heart-throb has pulsed along the iron 
artery. 

Another epoch has passed for Boone Centre. 

The 5.20 is gone. 

Nothing to do now until the 7.13 to-morrow 
morning. 

Wonder if anybody we know will come in on 
Her? 

Let's go up to the postoffice and see who gets 
letters. Pap Beesley's pension usually comes in 
on this mail. 



213 



HOROSCOPE 

On this day the stars are in peculiar conjunc- 
tions, except those in the constellation of Orion, 
which is Irish, and therefore in opposition. 

Good and evil influences predominate in Nep- 
tune ; if you do not feel one kind, you will feel the 
other; the price of this horoscope is one dollar, 
and you can take your choice. In any case, it will 
be wise not to undertake any enterprise without 
beginning it. 

It is a most unlucky time for those who at this 
time are not lucky. Requests for advancement in 
position and a raise in salary will be invariably 
denied to-day, except in those instances where 
they are granted or postponed. Whenever Sirius 
is in the ascendant it is a serious situation (help! 
help!), and those who owe money and have none 
with which to pay are apt to find themselves em- 
barrassed. 

Jupiter's position plainly indicates that the 
wealthy will have more luxuries than those that 
are poor. It is a good time for clothiers to mark 
their $io suits up to $15, and then mark them 

214 



down to $14.98. The astral Indications for this 
procedure are such as to give warrant to the be- 
Hef that they will either sell more goods or not 
so many. Otherwise business will be much the 
same. 

Bankers and brokers should delay important 
contracts to-day, except in those instances where 
a red-headed office boy is employed. In such 
cases Mars rules, Mars being the red planet, con- 
noting radishes. Notes that cannot be collected 
should be renewed. 

At this season the precession of the equinoxes 
shows that all persons over ninety years of age 
will suffer from decrepitude, while those under 
twelve will be exempt from this trouble. 

Children born to-day will be either boys or 
girls, according to the sex, and will live to a very 
old age, unless they should happen to die, in which 
case they will not live so long. 

There will be many accidents to-day In all those 
states which in the geography are colored pink. 
The mystical number of pink is seven, and geog- 
raphy minus seven always leaves accidents. Those 
who are lost at sea during this week and remain 
for a sufficient length of time under the water will 
probably be drowned. 

Antares and Arcturus stand to the northeast of 
each other and plainly point out that those who 
cannot get anything to eat will be liable to go 
hungry. The signs, however, are favorable to 

215 



those who are thirsty, provided any one offers 
them a drink. 

Working girls who receive $6.50 a week and 
under will wish they had more, owing to the in- 
fluence of Capricorn, which stands in the House 
of Misery. Those whose incomes, however, is 
$100,000 a year and over are not likely to be 
disturbed. The effects of Capricorn do not reach 
above $10,000 a year. 

Uranus again foretells a surprising interest in 
psychic phenomena. All who are interested in 
Eastern mysticism will probably be concerned in 
oriental transcendentalism, especially Tuesdays 
and Fridays, which are blue. It should be noted 
that these days are not only blue, but they are 
very hard and brittle. 

Persons whose birthday is to-day should avoid 
all varieties of misfortune. Do not sit under a 
descending pile-driver, do not carry a lighted 
bomb in your breast pocket, and do not step in 
front of an advancing locomotive. 

Girls who marry to-day will marry men, in 
which case they will probably regret it. 

The neophyte should remember that the sun 
rises in the east, the planets go by circumlocutions, 
it is impossible to extract the cube root of two, 
and extraneous discombobulations sometimes ex- 
cruciate the prophylacterum chyli. 



216 



THE NEIGHBOR 

Yes, said Mrs. Featherstone, weVe moved 
back to the city, and now I can have a little pri- 
vacy. We're in a building where there are thirty 
flats, and I don't know a solitary family there, 
and thanks be ! I never expect to. 

Me for the terrible loneliness of the metrop- 
olis. I could eat it. 

Will had to work up state last year, so we 
moved to Smalltown. We had the loveliest cot- 
tage, and I was tickled to death at first. Every- 
thing was going so to be cosy and homey and 
neighborly. 

It wasn't long until I got acquainted with my 
NEIGHBOR. It was about our second chat over 
the back fence that I found myself answering 
questions. 

She was a raw-boned woman with a high voice 
and the most militant friendliness. She came 
over to the fence, when she had finished hanging 
out her clothes, and began. 

How many rooms did I have ? How much did 
my mail box cost? Where did I get it? She 

217 



could get one much cheaper because she knew the 
man at the store. 

Wasn't there something the matter with my 
little girl? No? Well, she looked like she had 
the rickets or something. If I had a doctor, I 
mustn't get old Doc Peasely; he drank; leastways 
people said he did. 

Did my husband drink? Did I get letters I 
didn't want my husband to see? Where did my 
husband work? How much wages did he get? 
Was he an Odd Fellow? All the men around 
here were Odd Fellows mostly. They had grand 
sociables. Was I a Rebecca? 

Where did I buy my meat and groceries? 
Where did I get my milk and butter? She would 
be glad to recommend her grocer, and so on. 
They couldn't cheat her. Not much! You had 
to watch 'em. 

Did I use face paint or powder? She knew a 
grand wrinkle remover. 

Was my hair my own? Didn't I spend lots of 
time doing it up? 

I came into the house dizzy. I felt as if I had 
been held upside down and all the information 
shaken out of me. But I was mistaken. She 
hadn't got fairly under way. 

Later she informed me that her way of doing 
her hair had been much admired; that her man 
was the smartest in the shop ; that the man's wife 
across the way stayed away from home a good 

2i8 



deal; that everybody hated Mrs. Bonebreak; and 
so on ad infinitum. 

She was at the train to see me off, when I left, 
and wanted to know why I left, if we were in 
debt, and why my Uttle girl was wearing that 
white coat on the dirty cars ; besides seven million 
other things. 

I tell you I was glad to escape to the lonely 
city, and last Sunday when the preacher gave 
thanks for being delivered from *'the noisome 
pestilence," I said "Amen" right out loud. 

For I thought of my neighbor. 



219 



GOING SOME 

Once men wrote with a quill pen and dried 
the ink by waving the paper in the air or sifting 
sand on It. Then steel pens were invented. Now 
they use FOUNTAIN PENS, SO as to save the time 
wasted by dipping the pen in the inkstand. The 
Ink Is dried by blotters. Some men, in a par- 
ticular hurry, sign their name with a rubber 

STAMP. 

Formerly the business man walked or rode 
horseback to his office, which was upstairs over 
the grocery. Thus did A. Lincoln et al. Now 
he goes down town on the subv^ay, street car, 
or ELEVATED, or In his automobile. 

His office is on the ninety-ninth floor of the 
Galaxy office building; he ascends by the 
elevator. 

He eats his lunch at the NOON club, where he 
can feed and transact business at the same time. 

When he wanted to go to another city he kissed 
his wife good-by, took a stage coach, and was 
gone a month ; now he goes to bed in a sleeping 
car and wakes up In the other city in the morn- 
ing. 

i20 



He dines leisurely in a dining car, instead of 
getting out at an eating station and bolting a hard 
boiled egg^ a cup of coffee, and a sandwich. 

To communicate from New York to San Fran- 
cisco used to require months, from Chicago to 
Pekin a year; now it needs but a few hours, by 
means of the telephone and cable. 

Instead of taking a week for a Boston man to 
go and see a customer in Albany, it is now an in- 
stantaneous matter of telephones. 

He writes forty letters by his stenographer 
and typewriter in the time it used to take to 
write one by hand. 

He formerly kept his papers tied in tape in 
packets and stored in pigeonholes; now he has an 
elaborate filing system. 

When he wanted to gamble he met his cronies 
in a back room and played 5-cent ante; now he 
drops in at a broker's office and takes a chance on 

the STOCK MARKET. 

Everything is cornered by experts. The babies 
are tended by trained nurses, then they are sent 
to KINDERGARTEN, then to scientifically organized 
schools, then to college, and finally to a law 
SCHOOL or MEDICAL SCHOOL. Ma used to look 
after her own offspring; they went to the little 
red schoolhouse with no grades and thirty-six 
classes, and they studied law with Judge Smith or 
medicine with old Doc Peasely. 

Man used to live in a regular house, with four 

221 



walls, a yard, a garden, and a front fence; now 
he lives in an apartment house, with electric 

LIGHTS, AUTOMATIC REFRIGERATORS, FOLDING 

BEDS, and no children or dogs allowed. 

When he read he used a book with stiff sides; 
now he buys a magazine, with a girl on the cover, 
or a NEWSPAPER, which furnishes him not only 
with news but also with history, philosophy, medi- 
cine, stories, essays, and fresh scandal. 

For exercise he used to saw wood or go hunt- 
ing; now he chases a little white ball with a club 
over a forty-acre lot. 

We are going some. A few arrive. When we 
do achieve success we go to Florida or California 
with paresis, eat oatmeal and grits, and sit on the 
porch and watch our children spend the pile as 
fast as we made it. 



222 



THE KNOWING PERSON 

I WOULD fain pour out a libation, a few drip- 
pings of ink solemnly imposed upon paper, to the 
Knowing Ones. 

I love to enter a shoe store and meet the ur- 
bane salesman who knows what I want better than 
I do. He smiles in a pained way at my sugges- 
tions. He tries, oh, so hard, to restrain his con- 
tempt when I Indicate my depraved tastes. He 
remarks, In hopes It will reduce me to a proper 
silence, that he^s been In the shoe business for 
twenty years. Finally he gets me so cowed that 
I walk away in footgear that Is killing me, and 
that I have to give to the janitor eventually, be- 
cause Mr. Knowltall Insisted that the shoes 
couldn't possibly hurt. 

Then there Is the lady who sits next you at din- 
ner. Her weapon Is her smile. I wish I could 
make you feel the deadening weight of that su- 
perior simper. For she knows It all, and when 
she dies wisdom shall die with her. She listens to 
your odd views with a half amused, half bored 
air. This type grows in New England thick as 
hazel bushes. 

223 



I must not omit the carpenter who knows pre- 
cisely how you want your shelf put up. You have 
almost to stand over him with a cocked revolver 
to get him to do what you want. And when he 
goes away he leaves you crushed under the con- 
sciousness of your utter ignorance of what's 
what. 

Let me speak of the waiter in the restaurant 
who is pained beyond words at the absurdity of 
your order, the head waiter who seats you where 
you don't want to sit, the clothier who will force 
a suit of clothes on you that you don't like, the 
physician who refuses to listen to your symptoms, 
who pats your arm as if you were a two year old, 
and who impresses you with the fact that you 
have nothing to do with this case — it is his busi- 
ness, you are only the man who is to take the 
medicine; and the boy who listens with ill-con- 
cerned Impatience to your fool advice, you being 
nobody but a father; and the girl who of course 
respects you as a mother, only you don't under- 
stand. 

I confess I hate all parade of familiarity with 
public personages. It goes against my grain to 
hear the knowing ones refer to the mayor as 
John, to the President as Woodrow, to actors and 
actresses as though they enjoyed the greatest inti- 
macy with them — old pals, you know, and all 
that. 

Why in the world is it assumed to be something 

224 



to make one chesty because he knows the sleeping 
car conductor, or the theatre ticket agent, or the 
orchestra leader in a restaurant, or an aviator, a 
senator, a criminal, a policeman, or any other of 
the spot-lighters? 

And yet I do confess to a certain awe In me 
when a friend with me speaks familiarly to one of 
these herders of the human crowd. For I know 
none of them. I am one of the cattle. I step 
lively when the guard on the subway yells at me. 
When the head waiter holds up his finger, I fol- 
low it hypnotized, to the darkest corner of the 
dining-room. 



225 



MR. AA 

The other day I read in the paper of a man 
by the name of Aa. 

If I should ever get a chance to change my 
name I would select Aa for my new title. 

In the first place, it is the easiest word in the 
world to say. All you have to do is to open your 
mouth and it says itself. Of course, Mm might 
be easier, but no one by that name has yet ap- 
peared; to say Mm you wouldn't even have to 
part your lips; but for reasons stated later Aa is 
better. 

A stutterer, even a deaf-mute, could not get 
your name wrong. No one could miss Aa. 

But the chief advantage would be your prom- 
inence in an alphabetic list. You would be first 
in the directory, first in the telephone book, first 
in Who's Who, first on the payroll, and first on 
the ballot. The Wilsons, the Yoakums, and the 
Zieglers would not be in the running. 

I heard recently of an election occurrence that 
illustrates. A man named Fred Abbot was candi- 
date for railway commissioner. A certain ele- 
ment wanted him defeated. They cast about, and 

226 



finally hit upon a bright idea. They found a Mr. 
Aarons, who allowed them to use his name as a 
candidate, though it was stipulated he need not do 
any campaigning. It was doubted if Aarons even 
voted for himself. 

But when the votes were counted it was discov- 
ered that Aarons, who never turned a hand to get 
elected, was unknown, and didn't want the office 
anyhow, got 8,772 votes, while the energetic Ab- 
bott got only 8,368. 

Speaking of unearned privilege, is it not about 
time that we all uprose and protested against the 
unreasonable favors that have always been shown 
to the A's, B's, and C's? Why not begin with 
the Z's and read up? 

It seems so entirely impartial to say, "Let us 
take the names in alphabetical order." But, 
speaking for the Teazels, Wombats and Zolli- 
coffers, I say it is not fair. 

Let us form a national society for the protec- 
tion of alphabetical tail-enders. Why not? We 
have societies for everything else under the sun. 



227 



THE EASTER SYMBOL 

Easter is a Christian festival fixed so as to oc- 
cur at the beginning of Spring. 

Among all primitive peoples, Norse, Egyptian, 
Hindu, or Greek, spring's coming was given a re- 
ligious significance. The Christian Fathers wisely 
took over this universal instinct and gave It ex- 
pression In one of the most important holy days in 
the calendar. 

The profound heart of mankind has always In- 
terpreted Nature spiritually; that Is, all events in 
the whole order of things, the seasons, the move- 
ments of the stars, the storms, and sun, were con- 
ceived to be SYMBOLS addressed to the soul of 
man, and not mere dead and meaningless factors. 

If a man were a stone he might think the uni- 
verse to be nothing but material; being a mind and 
a heart he persists in fancying the world also Im- 
bued with purpose and feeling. From this comes 
the race-wide phenomenon of religion. 

Without entering Into the theological side of 
Easter, let us ask ourselves, *'What is there In 

228 



human nature of which the spring-coming is a fit 
symbol?" 

In four ways the soul sees itself at springtime 
in the reveahng mirror of Nature. It sees its own 
RHYTHMIC LAW, the perpetual triumph of 

YOUTH OVER OLD AGE, of HOPE OVER DESPAIR, 
and of LIFE OVER DEATH. 

1. The RHYTHMIC LAW. Herbert Spencer 
beautifully explained how all motion is rhythmic, 
none is continuously steady. The blood circulates 
in pulses, the breath is taken regularly, day and 
night alternate, winds blow in gusts, laughter and 
weeping are spasmodic, and so on. So also the 
progress of growth, the education of the mind, the 
unfolding of the soul, and the progress of civiliza- 
tion advance and recede, yet with a constant excess 
of advance ; they go forward not as the river flows 
but as the waves of the tide rise. So the common 
philosophy of the people says, *We all have our 
ups and downs," "The darkest hour is just before 
the dawn," and the like. 

2. The triumph of youth over age. This 
is a perpetually young world; it is for youth, not 
old age. Trees shed their leaves, plants die, all 
vegetation periodically disappears and comes 
again young; lest the earth be filled with old 
things. So mankind perpetuates itself, not by the 
old living on, but by babies coming to replace 
them, that it may remain youthful forever. Youth 
is the eternal truth, it is Nature's point of view. 

229 



Whatever the great Spirit may be who animates 
all things, it is a Spirit that continually renews its 
youth. The world is just as young now of a 
Spring morning as it was In the days of Nineveh. 
Boys and girls attack life as freshly now as did 
the children of the ancient Egyptians. Then let 
it be so in our own experience, and may the young 
joy and wonder of life be constantly re-born in us 1 

3. The triumph of hope over despair. 
Despair is essentially temporary, self-destructive. 
It Is a passing Winter. But Hope is the inevitable 
Spring, and comes to the hearts of brave men and 
women as surely as comes the round of the Sea- 
sons. The tides of cheer, joy and optimism in the 
race are inexhaustible. It Is forever a happy 
world, in the larger view. ^'Weeping may endure 
for the night, but joy cometh In the morning." 

4. The triumph of life over death. Men 
die every day, and hearts break, and bodies be- 
come diseased and decrepit. But this world re- 
mains a world for the living and not the dead, of 
joyous lovers and not the disillusioned, of young 
courage and not old fear. The mind of universal 
man refuses to believe in death; all our thought 
and love is Impregnated with life. We shall live 
on; it is not logic that proves it, but It Is an in- 
extinguishable instinct. 

These are the truths about himself man reads 
in the Symbol of the returning Spring. This is the 
cosmic meaning of Easter. 

230 



So Whittler : 



The night is mother of the day, 
The Winter of the Spring, 

And ever upon old decay 
[The greenest mosses cling. 



231 



THE LAND OF BEGINNING AGAIN 

When the young April with his showers sweet 
did lure folk to the open a company of pilgrims set 
out upon the road to seek a country of which they 
had heard, which hes over to the east of the King- 
dom of Dreams. 

It is called the Land of Beginning Again. 

First came a man of fifty. He was heavy of 
stature and short of breath. Little purplish 
blotches showed upon his face. His eyes were 
bent eagerly toward the goal. To the reporter he 
said: "Yes, I missed It with my life. I gorged at 
the flesh-pots. I went the sensual pace. Look at 
me! Physically I am skating on thin ice; a blood 
vessel's liable to break any minute. But I hope to 
get to that land before sunset." He trudged on, 
blowing hard. 

"Spoiled my happiness," said a woman with 
faded beauty. "Selfish, that was the whole 
trouble. Nagged my husband, neglected my chil- 
dren. Now it's nerves and the hell of self-pity. 
Do you think I can get there?" 

"Just out of the penitentiary," said a pale-faced 

232 



man. "It was the way of the fool I took. Cards, 
women, and liquor — you know the story. At last 
— crime. They tell me I can find that Land. I 
shall — or die on the way.'* 

"Me?" said a shabby one. "Why, I was one of 
those smart boys. I knew more than my father 
and mother. I wouldn't go to school. So I 
tackled the world untrained. I was outclassed. 
I have been grubbing along in the ditch, when I 
might have been among the successful. When I 
arrive at the Land and get my lost chance back — 
well, watch me !" 

The reporter moved among the crowd and 
noted them. There were those whom disease had 
caught. There were those who had deserted their 
ideals and were now running to find them again. 
There were hearts dried and cold, who had killed 
love. There were those in whose bosoms were 
the serpents of self-contempt, seeking the self-re- 
spect they longed for. There were the world- 
weary rich, loathing themselves and their posses- 
sions, going to find the fountains of adventure. 
There were the fools, who had sold their birth- 
right for a mess of pottage. There were the un- 
disciplined, who had sacrificed all for a moment 
of anger or of lust. 

To all those who had taken the wrong fork of 
the road, and found out too late their mistake, the 
news had gone forth that there was a Land of 
Beginning Again. As this little company marched 

233 



on their numbers grew. Here came a painted 
woman whose heart was a sepulchre. Here a 
drug taker with brain afire. One by one they who 
had wandered into the devious by-paths of folly 
and had fought with the reptiles that haunt the 
human jungle were falling in and were pilgrims of 
the morning. 

The sun shone cheerfully. The white road be- 
fore them was inviting. The intoxication of hope 
was in the air. The birds chirped, "Hope, hope, 
cheer up!" The dogs barked, "You can I You 
can!" 

And a poet among them sang: 

I wish that there were some wonderful place 

Called the Land of Beginning Again, 
Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches 

And all our poor, selfish grief 
Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door, 

And never put on again. 

I wish we would come on it all unaw^ares, 

Like the hunter who finds a lost trail ; 
And I wish that the one whom our blindness had done 

The greatest injustice of all 
Could be at the gates like an old friend that waits 

For the comrade he's gladdest to call. 

— Tarktngton. 



234 



THE INNER PARLIAMENT 

Inside the human breast is a Parliament. 

When you consider whether or not you will do 
a certain thing there is always an inward discus- 
sion, sometimes orderly, sometimes turbulent. 

Joan of Arc thought she heard voices in her 
childhood at Domremy. But the decision in the 
case of every one of us is accompanied by many 
voices. 

The WILL is the judge upon the bench. Each 
voice tries to influence, to persuade him. 

The question arises: "Shall I do a certain 
thing?" 

Desire speaks up. It has but one word, but 
that is a tremendous one. It is ''I want to." It 
speaks loudly. Its tones echo. The whole body 
trembles, applauds, for Desire is its spokesman. 

Then comes conscience. It speaks for the 
spirit, as Desire for the body. It says "I ought," 
"I ought not." Desire and Conscience argue 
hotly. 

Here enters a third voice, that of reason. 
Sometimes it is the bribed lawyer of Desire. 
Sometimes it is the attorney of the soul. It talks 



volubly, subtly, giving excuses, citing examples, 
adducing palliations. 

Now perhaps fear steps forward. It presents 
consequences of pain, of humiliation. It warns 
the body against results of yielding to desire; It 
warns the spirit against the high price of noble- 
ness. 

Imagination takes the floor. It does not rea- 
son. It presents pictures, now beautiful, enticing, 
as it sides with Desire; now appalling as it sides 
with Fear. 

Love rises to speak. It takes the argument out 
of self, and pleads the welfare of another. How 
will the issue affect the beloved? Will it hurt or 
please him or her? The Will must hear that 
plea, too. 

Another speaker Is the community, a Voice 
which represents your fellow men. What will 
THEY think of you? Will THEY praise or blame, 
reward or condemn? No one is wholly indifferent 
to the judgment of others. 

Other Voices take part. Pride has Its say. 
Dull OBSTINACY asserts itself. Adventure makes 
Its bold and seducing proposals. Caution shakes 
its warning finger. LoVE of ease has a tone that 
is strongly persuasive. And pure mischief Is not 
always silent. 

Besides, there is that Voice which Victor Hugo 
so graphically depicts in the scene In "Les Miser- 
ables," where Jean Valjean is arguing with himself 

236 



whether to be base or noble. He speaks of it as a 
deep Voice, thunderous as the sea. It is God. 

Unfortunate are those human creatures whose 
inner Parliament is but a riotous mob, in whom 
decisions are reached by clamor, panic, stampede. 

And fortunate they whose inward debates are 
orderly, whose Will is a sober and upright judge, 
whose decisions are based upon full and fearless 
debate, and whose judgment stands. 



237 



THE TEACHER 

I HAVE received the following letter : 

*'I wish you would express through your 
columns your opinion of the teaching pro- 
fession for a man. 

"I have an innate feeling that it is my 
work; that I can make both myself and others 
happy by pursuing it. My parents and 
friends discourage me from entering upon it, 
because it promises such small financial re- 
turns. 

"Why is teaching, the noblest profession 
of all, looked upon with such contempt by the 
majority of people when it is taken up by a 
man? 

*'I trust that you will give your readers 
the benefits of your views on this subject." 

To think clearly upon this matter, the first thing 
you must do is to ask yourself: What kind of a 
life do I want? What do I regard as success? 

If you want to make money, and to gain promi- 
nence, power, pleasures and lordly ways that the 
rich have, do not go in for teaching; nor, for that 

238 



matter, for art, literature, preaching and the like. 
The chances of becoming wealthy In these callings 
are a hundred to one against you. 

If, on the other hand, what you want Is to ac- 
quire efficiency in your vocation, to live simply and 
with economy, to make just enough money to live 
in comfort, to save up a bit against a rainy day, 
and to find your life's pleasure In your work, then 
you may take up some intellectual pursuit. 

If you are a real, born teacher, then to you the 
amassing of money Is a second rate business. 

Of all the professions in the world undoubtedly 
the greatest is teaching, whether reckoned by the 
results upon others or the results upon yourself. 

The most valuable property a man can have is 
what Bushnell called *'the property right in souls." 

All forceful men are creators. The business 
man creates one kind of values, the artist another; 
but the best kind of all are those values created 
by the teachers; they consist in character, training, 
thought-power and soul-strength. 

To clear up the ideas of others, to awaken high 
enthusiasm!) In them, to equip their minds against 
false reasoning and clap-trap, and to render them 
vigorous and skilful, is the very best business 
known. 

If you like that sort of thing, if it makes you 
content, if you realize the wonder and nobleness 
of It, then teach. 

But if you measure success by salary, and if you 

239 



are continually lusting for the flesh-pots of money- 
grubbers, then keep out of the teacher's trade. 

There Is a large portion of the world to whom 
success means only money. They suppose that 
only those persons engage In professional life who 
are incompetent to sell goods or win on the board 
of trade. 

They cannot understand* such a man as Agasslz, 
who when offered a lucrative office replied: "I 
have no time to make money." 

The financial rewards of men, as society Is now 
constituted, are far from being in proportion to 
the worth of their services. A certain fox-like 
cunning, whereby a man makes a fortunate venture, 
can bring him $100,000 for five minutes' work. 
The quahty of mind that earns $50,000 a year in 
a bank or a corporation is not very high; It Is 
simply scarce. Besides, every day thousands of 
dollars are left by inheritance to Idle, worthless 
and vicious heirs, who do nothing at all to merit 
their pay. 

With the real rewards, such as self-respect, joy 
In craft. Inward content and the pleasure of 
creative work upon an exalted plane, the rewards 
are certain and not fantastically unequal. 

But It takes a superior mind to feel this. And 
unless you belong to the real aristocracy of souls 
you had better let teaching alone, and go Into the 
great North American game of money-making. 



240 



^OUTH 

nost striking lapses of memory 
forgetting of youth. We fail 
Tiber how it used to be with us 
I hence fall into the most inex- 
standings with the new genera- 

lU, for instance, that at the age 
you did not care a whoop about 
rhy do you squirm so now, and 
imazed, when the group of tots 
3w shriek at each other, scream 
le top of their power, and howl 
i when they fall and skin their 
:o see why on earth they need to 
se. The trouble with you is that 
t, quiet, and peace are no treat 

►RDER. Did any human being be- 
ZT at any time want to put any- 
it belongs? Or otherwise dread 
IT is another old-age microbe, at- 
Is that have begun to go to seed, 
ildren should be trained to keep 

241 



are continually lusting for the flesl 
grubbers, then keep out of the te 

There is a large portion of the 
success means only money. Th( 
only those persons engage in profe 
are incompetent to sell goods or v 
of trade. 

They cannot understand- such a 
who when offered a lucrative oi 
have no time to make money.*' 

The financial rewards of men, z 
constituted, are far from being i 
the worth of their services. A 
cunning, whereby a man makes a fc 
can bring him $100,000 for five 
The quality of mind that earns $; 
a bank or a corporation is not ^ 
simply scarce. Besides, every di 
dollars are left by inheritance to 
and vicious heirs, who do nothing 
their pay. 

With the real rewards, such as 
in craft, inward content and t 
creative work upon an exalted pla 
are certain and not fantastically u 

But it takes a superior mind to 
unless you belong to the real arisi 
you had better let teaching alone, 
great North American game of 

240 



FORGETTING YOUTH 

One of the most striking lapses of memory 
among us is the forgetting of youth. We fail 
signally to remember how it used to be with us 
when young, and hence fall into the most inex- 
cusable misunderstandings with the new genera- 
tion. 

Don't you recall, for Instance, that at the age 
of ten and under you did not care a whoop about 
QUIET? Then why do you squirm so now, and 
why are you so amazed, when the group of tots 
under your window shriek at each other, scream 
out laughter at the top of their power, and howl 
like hurt puppies when they fall and skin their 
nose ? You fail to see why on earth they need to 
make so much noise. The trouble with you Is that 
you forget. Rest, quiet, and peace are no treat 
to youngsters. 

Then there is order. Did any human being be- 
low the teens ever at any time want to put any- 
thing back where it belongs? Or otherwise dread 
confusion? Order Is another old-age microbe, at- 
tacking only minds that have begun to go to seed. 

To be sure, children should be trained to keep 

241 



still and to be orderly; but the point is that the 
average normal child does not hanker after these 
virtues, and that we should not be so put out, and 
should not think our children exceptional and in- 
corrigible when they are riproarious and love to 
upset. 

If we remembered we should be more patient. 

Do you forget how you hated to have your ears 
washed, hated to go to bed, and hated to wait to 
be helped to the pudding until after all the grown- 
ups were attended to? 

Does the mother forget the wild fancies and 
wayward impulses of her own girlhood? Does 
she think she was always as sober and sensible as 
she is now? And why is it that grandmother 
seems to remember all this better than mother? 

Does the staid father forget how he once 
wanted to be a pirate, or a circus clown, or a cow- 
boy? Why does he think it so marvellous a thing 
that his boy has the adventurous fever? 

And why are we so impatient and petulant with 
the absurdities of "puppy love"? Can't we recall 
the days when we ourselves, at fifteen or so, were 
mad over the little girl with a pink dress who lived 
down the street? Did not you, one time, oh, 
fifty-year-old man, mope in the gloaming, and 
walk under her window, and make fuzzy little 
verses, rhyming star and afar, love and dove, and 
breath and death? 

Come, come ! brush up your recollection ! You, 

242 



too, mounted once the peaks of youthful fancy, 
and believed with your whole heart what now 
seems nonsense, and had all the strange exuber- 
ances, infatuations, and Quixotic notions, together 
with the monumental disregard for order, cleanli- 
ness, and quiet, that mark your children. 

Teach your young, to be sure, discipline, lecture, 
or even spank them if you will, but — ^don^t 

FORGET I 



243 



BE POLITE 

Americans are very clever. We naturally 
think we are the people, and there are none equal 
to us. 

But there are a few things we can learn from 
other nations, and especially from the Orient. 

One of these things is politeness. 

I hate to say it, but the truth is that Americans 
are, to a too great degree, uncivil, gruff, snippy, 
and impolite. 

In Japan M. Brieux, the French author, was 
struck by the uniform gentility of the people, even 
the lowest orders. 

When two bicyclists collided and were spilled, 
they got up, brushed their clothing, and were 
smilingly apologetic to one another. They did 
not swear, grumble, and threaten. 

The young jinrikisha men would not push In 
ahead of the old, for fear they would hurt their 
feelings. 

When a Chinese editor returns a manuscript to 
an author he does not send therewith a cold, curt, 
and cruel printed slip, but writes a letter some- 
thing like this : 

244 



"We have been enchanted to read your honored 
manuscript. Upon the tomb of our ancestors we 
swear that never, never have we tasted anything 
so sublime. Such literary pearls are created but 
once every thousand years. If we should publish 
it in our humble journal we should never dare to 
print another thing more. We could not possi- 
bly keep up to this standard. It is for this reason 
that we are taking the liberty of returning to you 
your amazing production." 

Think of that now. And in this country the 
man who thinks he can write is treated as if he 
were a crawling worm, to be crushed by the edi- 
torial heel. 

Because the orientals are polite they do not have 
to forego the pleasure of cutting one another's 
throat, and all the joys of mayhem and bruising. 
Only they do not go at it roughly. 

It's "After you, my dear Alphonse," before 
they insert the knife. 

Politeness is a distinct social asset. It cheers us 
all up. Every time you take off your hat to a 
lady, or say "I thank you," or "A thousand par- 
dons, my dear sir," the sun shines a little brighter. 

By being polite you not only add to the happi- 
ness of others, but you increase your own. 

Your liver works better. There is joy in the 
island of Reil. There ensues a proper deoppila- 
tion of the spleen. The pancreas starts up. And 
there is general lubrication and smoothness of ac- 

245 



tion among all the electrons of body and soul. It 
is a better "pick-me-up" than corn juice. 

And it doesn't cost a cent. 

Try it. 



246 



STOP! LOOK! LISTEN! 

Stop ! Look ! Listen 1 

Why so hot, little man? 

You know a lot of things; suppose you take a 
day off and try to realize a few things. For what 
you KNOW may have little to do with your life, 
but what you realize enters into you. 

You rise every day and go to work. You do 
and you do and you do. You admire *'the man 
who does things." You march and countermarch 
with the sidewalk army. At night you go to bed 
tired. Yet you have not lived at all; you have' 
only striven. 

Some day you will heave a last sigh and quit for 
good. Then they will shovel you In. And what 
will you have got out of It all? 

So take a day off and live. Begin with the 
dawn. Have you ever seen It, the slow paling of 
the sky into gray, and then on through soft pink 
and heliotropes and washen yellows. Into light 
triumphant? Put your soul up against the dawn, 
not to study It scientifically, not in a purposeful 
way, but just to feel it, love it, and try to under- 
stand it. 

247 



Go away somewhere, to trees, the ocean, the 
river, moors and birds. 

Did you never imagine that life is good in it- 
self, and quite apart from anything you may do 
with It? Just EXISTENCE is marvellous. 

Forget, for this day, all those petty precepts 
that advise you to improve the time, to give every 
flying moment to some useful task, to work while 
you rest, and the like, and live. 

Watch that tree, long, patiently. Think not of 
how much cordwood it will make, nor the fruit it 
will bear, but the slow sap crawling up and down 
in its appointed season, of how amazing it is that 
a veined and delicately cut leaf should come out of 
a hard twig, and of Time that has folded his arms 
about the rugged trunk and left the yearly marks 
of his embrace upon the inner wood. 

Look at the ocean, not for information, but for 
inspiration. Let its wide roar drift into your soul. 
Let its sheet of blue wrap you round, its deep 
caverns whisper to you, its flying gulls write their 
message upon your mind. Look and listen, and 
open your heart, until you perceive that dim SOME- 
THING that lies behind, below, and above all oceans 
and stars, that something we call Eternity, the 
Infinite. 

Watch the birds, the squirrels, all the wild 
things. Only by the deepest silence and motion- 
less patience can you surprise their secret. Their 
world is not as your world; it is strange, quiet, 

248 



evasive. Get into it; you will come back to men 
and affairs with a peculiar sense of vision and 
power. 

Taste each hour. Do not reckon time. When 
you are hungry, eat, and enjoy every bite. When 
you are thirsty, drink, and taste each drop. When 
you are sleepy, doze. 

Say to yourself: "I am living. As the tree 
lives, and the woodpecker, and the beetle, so I am 
quaffing existence." 

By and by the blue sky, the grass, the leaves 
stirring, bowing, motioning, the winds making 
low shreds of melody, the soft babble of running 
water, the cheep of the sparrows, the vast, low 
voiced ALL of Nature, will bring something to you, 
something strange, mysterious, and beautiful, 
something no words can utter, something that will 
rebuke your littleness and petulance, dry up the 
wounds of failure, and sweetly heal you. 

Stop ! Look ! Listen ! And learn what life is ! 



249 



GOD'S MODESTY 

The reason why many persons do not believe 
in God and never see God is because they are 
looking for a medieval Ruler and not a modern 
Servant. 

Modernity has taught us that real Greatness 
consists in Modesty and Service, and not in Pride 
and Tyranny. So the greater a being the more he 
hides. And no one hides himself like the Almighty 
^'Servant of All.'' 

• For does not God, in His World, keep persis- 
tently in the background? So much so that many 
deny there is any such Being. If He were a ruler 
of the medieval type He certainly would make 
some display. But He never rends the heavens 
and comes down. He has never allowed Hims'elf 
the pardonable weakness of appearing in bodily 
presence to acknowledge the enthusiastic plaudits 
of His admirers. (When He came we did not 
know Him.) 

All we can know of Him in nature is to be gath- 
ered from what He does. Is not that like a 
Worker, an honest, faithful Servant, proud and 

250 



eager to perform His work, but escaping when we 
attempt to praise ? 

There in the night sky above us He works, 
rolling the stars, keeping up the fire of the sun, 
distilling the dews, sweeping the villages with His 
winds. Here He is about us in the Spring, bring- 
ing to pass the miracle of green things growing, 
ushering in the violet, unrolling the fern, painting 
the crocus, guiding the brook, and turning the 
fecund warmth of His sun against the loving 
earth. 

There is no exhibition of self, no bid for ap- 
plause; only work, work, work, and just for the 
beauty and joy of it, the delight in creating. 

Naturally, advertising humbugs cannot believe 
such a being exists. 

None is so shy as Eternal Omnipotence. He is 
gentle and modest as a girl, even as are all the 
truly great men and women on this earth. 

If we knew what manner of person God is we 
might more believe in Him. And if we understood 
what genuine greatness of character is we should 
expect God to be rather The First Gentleman of 
the Universe than a belated Oriental Sultan. 



2^V 



EARLY SPRING 

For the northern half of the United States this 
Is the most beautiful week In the year. 

If you care anything at all for the handicraft 
of the Divine Artist, now Is the time to go look at 
His work. He never did anything more wonder- 
ful than He Is doing right now. 

Out In the country you can get some Idea of the 
myriad contents of the word green. You dis- 
cover that It Is not one color, but a whole range of 
colors. 

Between the dark pine at one extreme, almost 
black, and the pale yellow-green shoots shyly 
emerging from the ground, there Is a chromatic 
scale of shades, as if Nature found the glory of 
greenness Inexhaustible. 

This week, too, there Is presented In Nature's 
studio a picture you can see at no other time. It 
is the tree adorned with leafage and yet showing 
all the lines of Its trunk and branches. In winter 
you find the woody lines clean cut; In summer they 
are concealed by the mass of foliage; In spring 
both are visible. 

This week the tree clothes are x-radiant. They 

252 



are fresh from the shop, spick and span, brilliant, 
refreshing. There are no worm-spotted leaves, 
no wind-torn garments. All plant life is dressed 
for a holiday. 

All about you is the expression of youth. The 
whole world is young. And there is something in 
mere youngness that is peculiarly appealing. 

It is Nature's season of filmy laces, also. A 
great tree full of bursting leaf-buds, small as rain- 
drops and delicate as embroidery, is a sight for 
angels. 

And what shall be said of the other colors — of 
the pink arbutus, the white spring-beauty, the blue 
violet? 

The flowering almond looks for all the world 
like a little girl in her Sunday best. 

The gnarled old apple tree has burst into a 
shower of white; a whole orchard seems a bit of 
heaven dropped upon earth. 

And what a dream of loveliness is a blooming 
peach tree ! 

Go out and see ! It is too cold yet for picnics, it 
is not the time as in June for lying on the grass, 
but it is the very hour for long walks, with just 
enough cold in the air to invite exercise. 

You can see through the woods. The tree 
trunks rise like temple pillars, the forest floor is a 
carpet of shining verdure, and all the air about 
you is full of green fire. 

Xo-day Nature is playing her most rapturous 

253 



symphony; to-day from her Infinite number of 
little lives, from grass and bough, from hyacinth, 
crocus and jonquil, comes a silent, seraphic chorus; 
and all the theme is life, joy, hope, beauty. 

The infinite force that creates all things Is ex- 
pressing Its tenderest mood. Do you miss It? 
Do you pass it by? 

Why, the very least accent of it, received into 
your soul, would intoxicate you. 

The All-Beautiful is knocking at your heart. Is 
spreading Its banners to enroll you In the army of 
cheer. 

What an amazing, dainty, gorgeous and en- 
chanting paradise Is this earth! 

It is a world to love in, to hope In, to be glad In. 

At least, this week It Is. 

Have you seen It? 



254 



THE MIND A REFUGE 

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote In a pref- 
ace to "David Balfour," one of her husband's 
books : 

"Never was a novel written In more distressing 
circumstances. With the [Samoan] natives on. 
the verge of war, and amid the most kaleidoscopic 
political changes, uncertain as to what moment 
his personal liberty might be restrained, his every 
action misconstrued and resented by the white 
Inhabitants of the island, the excitement and 
fatigue of my husband's daily life might have 
seemed enough for any one man to endure with- 
out the additional strain of literary work; but he 
found time besides for the study of harmony and 
counterpoint." 

Fix that picture in your fancy, of the man amid 
all the wash and turmoil of circumstance finding 
a refuge in his mind, withdrawing Into himself as 
into a walled citadel of peace, with his beloved 
vocation and avocation. 

It's an ugly world sometimes, and distressing. 
Have you any place where you can escape it? 

Blessed is the man who has resources of con- 
tentment ! 

255 



Thrice blessed when those resources are with- 
in himself and depend not on men and things I 

There are those whose natures are so lean and 
poor that if some certain thing happens they are 
done for. They are like a turtle on its back, and 
can only kick and gesticulate in helplessness. 

The advantage of culture is not only greater 
efficiency and better pay, nor that silly pride in 
excellence, but it lies in the possession of a hun- 
dred by-ways of escape from what would crush 
another. 

The well equipped mind is never at bay. The 
hounds of fate cannot corner it. It slips away. 

Let loss of money, of place, or of reputation 
come, or illness, or shame, or betrayal, or any 
messenger of the enemy; they cannot find him. 

I know one man that studies the Persian lan- 
guage, another who roams the myriad ways of 
philology, another who is a devoted entomologist, 
another who is impassioned of the curiosities of 
mathematics, another who is an expert at chess 
problems, and a woman of fifty who still pursues 
her studies of Bach and old Italian music. 

These various intellectual passions are cities of 
refuge. The blows of tragedy and the slow 
smotheration of the commonplace cannot catch 
the nimble mind that always has its secret panel- 
door and underground passage. 



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